When we started developing Moocher, I did my customary scan of Lifehacker archives and a Google search to see if my favorite IDE, Notepad ++, had any decent competition yet. Turns out that its still the best out there, but I did stumble upon Bespin, another diamond in the rough from Mozilla Labs. Like the Bespin of Star Wars lore, Mozilla's application floats in the (digital) cloud, and lets you manage your code projects from anywhere via a web browser.
I signed up for an account immediately and began poking around to see if this was going to become my new favorite IDE. I liked the default dark background with light font colors, but the interface felt sluggish and wasn't as seamless as expected. Now I usually rely on Dropbox to keep my project files synchronized across my devices, but I have to copy files to a local folder and fire up my IDE before I can start developing. With Bespin, I can open up Firefox, mosey on over to the website and start coding. And I did just that later that day, during my 15 minute break between meetings at the library.
After running into a couple of other bugs/issues I decided that it wasn't for me.... yet. Bespin shows great potential, and I'm sure it will rise to challenge conventional editors, especially when plugins like Firebug are ported onto its extensible framework. I'm going to keep an eye on this project in the coming months.
Links: Mozilla Bespin, Dropbox, Notepad ++
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