Powered By Pulse

Posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 11:33am by Rob Wilkerson

Or not.

On the long flight back from Bangalore, I settled in to do some work. The work was local and I use Eclipse as my IDE so I was ready to rock.

Or not.

For a while now, I’ve been trying Pulse to manage my Eclipse installs across multiple computers. I’ve had significant, but not critical, issues in other areas that I won’t go into here, but because I’ve got a few active projects on my plate, I didn’t want to take the time to rebuild my entire Eclipse installation. On the flight, though, the camel’s back was broken.

The only way to open an Eclipse install that is managed by Pulse is to run the “Pulse Launcher”. The “Pulse Launcher”, though, checks for updates and looks up your profile online. Now, in Pulse’s defense, I knew all of this. I just assumed that, in the absence of an internet connection, Pulse would do the right thing and just launch the local profile as it existed the last time I ran it.

Or not.

Suffice to say that it doesn’t. I was left sitting on a plane with work to do that I couldn’t do in my preferred IDE. Not good. Local software, even applications that have an online component, should be available offline. Period.

To be fair, a new version of Pulse was recently released. Maybe an offline capability has been added, but now I may never bother to find out.

, 2 Comments

Subscribe2 Comments on Powered By Pulse

  1. Jens said...

    Rob;

    Thanks for posting your thoughts on Pulse. We value any and all feedback.

    You mentioned knowing a new release of Pulse was out. Have you had a chance to give it a try? I ask because in Pulse 2.x, we’ve changed the IDE launch flow to take server connectivity entirely out of the loop for Eclipse startup.

    Using any of the Pulse 2.x technology, you will not run into your described issue. Instead, you will be directly launching the IDE so whether on a plane or not, you can keep using your chosen software along with Pulse functionalities.

    During the initial releases of Pulse (which it appears you are utilizing), having the Pulse technology as a blocking step to launch an IDE was both a performance hit as well as a potential reliability concern and we therefore changed that flow in Pulse 2.

    Please let me know if Pulse 2.1 (available now) solves these issues for you, and please let us and/or the world know your thoughts on the matter.

    Thanks again,
    Jens
    Pulse team

    ...on
  2. Rob Wilkerson said...

    As I mentioned, I haven’t had the chance to try v2.x yet. If these issues have been fixed, I may just do that. I really like what Pulse is trying to do, but the shortcomings of the first release were just too distracting.

    Thanks for sharing this information. I’ll post my thoughts on 2.x once I’ve had a chance to work with it.

    ...on

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