First posted addendum to the "Alice 3 Quick Reference Guide"

Attached is a zipped version of the first addendum to my “Alice 3 Quick Reference Guide.” Surprisingly, at least to me, it is an early draft of “Addendum 2 – NetBeans Related.” This one I will update. Frankly NetBeans has always been (and still is) fairly intimidating to me. (If you don’t think it is, you don’t understand it. Please note the 100+ available plugins.)

There are four things that prompted me to put this first:

1. LanceA explained out how to actually get NetBeans up and running and how to load Alice 3 projects. (He may still explain to me how to independently run .jar files efficiently.) Thank you, Lance! I should also note tha “arevira” is also doing some great postings in the forum, though I haven’t really absorbed that information yet.

2. Once you have NetBeans, it is really easy to add the BlueJ plugin (one click of a checkbox). That’s an IDE (admittedly only a teaching one) that even I can (sort of) get my mind around.

3. With the Alice plugin, you can really see the underlying structure of the Alice 3 code – and get a start at understanding the underlying principles as well. Not to mention being able to do some program editing to get things that aren’t supported yet in Alice 3 Beta0055 (a large color palette for one) – and thus hopefully let the Alice 3 team (great job “guys”) concentrate on the problems unique to their environment.

4. Figuring out Alice 3 Beta with the “hunt and peck” method is fairly difficult – not to mention that the Beta version is nearly certain to change before the final release. Because of item 3, however, I could actually conceive of Alice 3 Beta being useful as a teaching tool for the Fall ’09 semester for some classes.

Use this information at your own risk – and be prepared to crash often. You’re working at a high level with Beta software – which Murphy makes sure is never easy.

Oh, and have fun.

Note: When I checked the URL listed for the NetBeans plugin this afternoon I got a "service not available" message. I got the same reply when I clicked on the "Plugins" button on the main NetBeans page, http://www.netbeans.org/ . It's possible the plugins section is being relocated so try the home page if the embedded URL doesn't work.