Jetbrains have released version 10.5 of their commercial Java IDE. I currently use version 10.0 so was intrigued to see what a 0.5 update meant. I downloaded it to try. Here are my first impressions:-
1. Speed is better. In the days of IDEA 5.0 it was the quickest tool around but since then performance has tailed off. In particular, it seems to spend a large amount of time indexing things which is frustrating. 10.5 is snappy and I have spent them morning using it for coding without any delay.
2. Better Mercurial support. I found Mercurial support disappointing on IDEA 10. There was an issue on my Mac which meant that the commit window was blank (so I could not review the code changes) and it was slow. I often dropped into command line and ran Mercurial by hand. IDEA 10.5 works perfectly on my Mac and it seems much faster.
3. New features. IDEA has a pretty complete featureset already, but the Java world does not keep still and most of the new features keep IDEA as a cutting edge tool. These include support for Java 7, and better support for technologies such as Android, Groovy, Flex.
4. Upgrade is free to current customers. If you are using 10.0 this version is significantly better and it is free.
Full details of the new features can be found on the IDEA website. I think it is a very worthwhile update and especially like the speed and better Mercurial support. What do you think of the new version?