IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 for the Groovy and Grails Developer

The formal release of IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 came out this month, and the new Groovy features are all part of the free and open source Community Edition, and the Grails features are part of the Ultimate Edition. IDEA X (or 10 to you non-Romans) was a larger release of the product, and I already blogged about IDEA X for Groovy and IDEA X for Grails. There’s still plenty of nice features in 10.5 though. The prices for IDEA recently dropped between $100 and $50, and anyone purchasing IDEA since last November gets 10.5 as a free upgrade.

You can read the full article detailing my overview of the features over on the Canoo blog.

There is also a whole bunch of other IDEA related content on my own blog and on the Canoo blog. And if you're feeling promotional, you can always upvote at DZone. Enjoy.

IntelliJ IDEA Keyboard Stickers

They finally arrived: IntelliJ IDEA keyboard stickers!

Inspired by the Vi Keyboard Stickers, I've been working with JetBrains over the last couple weeks to create keyboard stickers to remind users (and myself) of the most common IDE shortcuts. Here are the stickers applied to my keyboard:

Do you see the subliminal advertising? No really, my business card always sits by my monitor like that.

Anyway, the keys and modifiers are color coded. Blue is control, red underline is Shift. So then the F9 key has the word "Compile" with a blue background and a red underline, it means that Ctrl+Shift+F9 is the shortcut for Compile.

I had to trim a few of the stickers for my Swiss keyboard (the Shift key is much smaller for instance), but otherwise the stickers adhere well and don't come up. I hand wrote all the Shift-values for the numbers, so that I can remember that Shift-3 is the * character (again, good for non-US keyboards). Also, there are one or two stickers that may not apply to non-US keyboards (I can't type Shift+[ for instance).

Remember to be extra careful when applying the stickers. Overlapping on the upper edge tends to catch your fingers, so either center them exactly or err on the side of bottom edge overlaps. And one last errata: the sticker for space is labeled "Backspace". This was my fault, but you can take a pen and scratch out the work "back". Viola, fixed.

Would you like a copy of the stickers for yourself? I have a giant stack of them and so does JetBrains. Here are some ideas on getting them from me, based on location:

• Near Switzerland? Come to a Hackergarten in Basel or just DM me (@HamletDRC)
• Denmark? I'll be at GR8 Conf May 17th to 19th
• Poland? I'll be at GeeCON in Krakow next week
• In the US? I'll soon be in New York and Salt Lake City for No Fluff, Denver for ÜberConf, and Minneapolis for GR8 in the US
• Spain? I'll be at Greach in Madrid in November
• Anywhere else in Europe?
Invite me to give a talk at your company! I am happy to jump on a plane and visit almost* anywhere. I can do IntelliJ IDEA specific talks and training, as well as any of the Java, Groovy, or Agile talks listed here. Invite me, and I'll see what I can do.

* I am no longer legally able to visit Barneveld in the Netherlands.