One week of beta1 - Installation time

So it has been one week of beta1 usage for me now. I'm participating in the NetCAT 60 program, yup I'm one of the chosen ones so I have to use beta1. And being the person I am, I am using it on a production project... although it is intended to be a project that is going to be highly successful... a mobile game that has a JavaEE backend.

But on to beta1. Having played with the dev builds recently as M10 was really not very useful and it prevented me from going back to M9 because of some installer issue I never tried to fix. The dev builds got fairly stable, but there were some annoying full-stops every now and then, and some of the builds had more error messages popping up than code completion dialogs.
The first thing that struck me after installing beta1 and using it, was how fast it started. That was a lot better than M10 and even better than the last dev build I had installed.
One of the things I change immediately after installing a NB version are the startup params, more precise the memory settings. All settings are tripled compared to the default settings. Starting of with a huge amount of memory allocated to the JVM seems to speed things up. Maybe its just psychological, but hey, if it looks faster it is faster.

Then on to the next steps, installing the plugins you can't do without. First of all I need to say that I downloaded and installed the full version. Everything is installed, although I don't plan to use the C/C++ support, the Ruby support and the profiler. Well maybe the profiler.
I still can't believe collaboration is not part of the standard installation. It is probably the plugin I use most apart from the obvious plugins that are part of the standard install. Collaboration is really important as I develop the game together with a friend of mine. He lives about 100 km away from me, so we meet in NB, discuss our progress in NB etc.

After having that done, well this time, I refrained from installing every other module I could find. I did install the PluginPortal plugin, but that's gone now, because it is not really usable because too often I selected a module that wasn't supporting NB 6, that is something that needs a fix. Only show plugins that are supporting the NB version I use.
I tried the SQE update center, but that is not supporting NB versions after M10, which is too bad, since these are really, and I mean really useful plugins.


Next is copying the Templates directory from my NB 5.5.1 installation. I don't believe in importing settings from a previous version, as I had some really bad experiences with older versions (upgrading from NB4 to 5 for example). I choose to redo the work I'd done in the previous version, and copy happily whatever needs copying.
I still need to find a way to smartly get my library definitions across from one version of NB to another. Fortunately I only have like 3 libraries defined, so that's easy to do by hand. But still...

And that's about it. Well almost. After opening the projects that make up our game, I define a project group as well. That's a feature I learned about just recently, where I had my own game projects (about 7 projects) and I was working with a customer (I did the UML design for them in NB) which had about 27 projects. Using groups made it really easy to switch over from my own work to the customer's projects.

So that was pretty much my installation of NB 6 beta1, quite uneventful, quite boring. Don't you just hate it when everything goes right, and you intended to blog about it. One feature request to the NB team: Don't make it so smoothly with beta2, so there's something to complain about when blogging about the installation.

Iwan