Tired of subversion folders and files showing up in your Eclipse project navigator and/or search results? Me too, luckily I found an easy way to banish them. First, right click on your project from the project navigator and select 'Properties'.  Under 'Resource' select 'Resource Filters'. Finally click 'Add...'.

What you want to do is create an exclude all filter type for folders and all children with the name '.svn'. Click OK twice to make them go away. I also found this prevents the files inside the SVN folders from appearing in search results.

I always liked the occurrence highlighting featured in a number of text editors, including Notepad++. Double-click on a word somewhere and the editor highlights other places in the same file where that word appears. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised to find this was something CFElipse has offered for some time and it's been under my nose the whole time.

On the toolbar is a non-descript 'forward arrow' looking button. Click it and occurrence highlighting is on. Alternatively, you can use ALT+SHIFT+O to toggle.

I didn't care for the default gray highlight color -- wanted something that stands out a bit more. After a bit more poking around, I found this could be changed in the Eclipse Preferences window under General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations. In the annotation types list, you'll find a 'CFEclipse Mark Occurrence' option. Change the display options to your liking.

During the software development process, I've found most clients have a hard time visualizing what you're planning on building them -- even with extremely detailed specifications. In the past, I've used slick product called Balsamiq for building mock-ups of the user interface and business processes. Including these visual aids along with the specs made things a lot clearer for the client as to what they were getting. If something wasn't quite how they wanted it, everything could be quickly modified, long before a line of code was written. The amount of time saved on one project alone could easily justify it's $80 price tag.

As luck would have it, I've run across something even better. Evolus has a similar prototyping tool called Pencil which has the fast majority of the features Balsamiq offers, and then some. Among these are the ability to have more than one mock-up per document (I remember having a whole folder of mock-ups per project when I used Balsamiq). Pencil also offers native interface widgets, in addition to the sketchy style. While Balsamiq offers sketchy only, they do have a lot more widgets.

Pencil is built on the Mozilla Framework, and although I prefer the standalone version, it's also available as a Firefox plug-in. Best part is its price tag: free! Licensed under the GPL (version 2), it's available under Windows and several flavors of Linux. Sounds like a Mac version is also in the works. Overall, I love the software and look forward to using it more.

Usually, when I need to sync files between machines or servers, both machines are on the network, and I can use WinMerge to tell me what's different. But, what if one of those servers isn't on the network, but is assessable via FTP? In the past, I've used a product called WebDrive which essentially exposes an FTP server as a mmountable drive, but not only was it slow, it did this weird caching thing that made it pretty much unusable for comparison tools like WinMerge. Faced with this problem again, I started looking around and ran across a product called GoodSync.

This slick little tools lets you sync files between two local folders, network shares, FTP or SFTP server, web dav servers, Amazon S3 accounts, and for some reason Windows Moible (via ActiveSync). I've been using it for a few days now and am really impressed. Makes pushing over changes very easy. It lets you sync in one or both directions, exclude files and folders (handy for all those svn folders), and so much more. Overall loving this product, well worth the $29 price tag, but a trial is available. Win and Mac flavors available.