I’m not talking about the Twilight movie. If you came here to find stony hands, I suggest you look elsewhere.

What I am talking about is the miscellaneous development IDE known as Eclipse. It is the biggest competitor to Visual Studio in terms of IDEs, although it only targets all those languages that Visual Studio does not support (i.e. non-Microsoft languages/platforms), so I’m not so sure you can call it a competitor.

Anyways, let me outline two scenarios for you. Scenario 1: you want to code a Windows Phone 7 (Silverlight) application. Here are the steps:

1. Get Visual Studio (perhaps through unsavory means, I’m no judge) and install it.
2. Get the Windows Phone 7 SDK and install it.
3. Open Visual Studio, goto new->project and choose Windows Phone 7. It lists some varieties of them, and each one gives you sample code showing how to do that specific item.

It’s pretty painless. Now, scenario 2: you want to create an Android app with Eclipse:

1. Download Eclipse. Get confused about which version you need. Get confused because it doesn’t have an installer, it just unzips.
2. Run it, watch it give you a generic error about not having a JRE.
3. Goto sun.com, download the Java JDK and install.
4. Run Eclipse again, watch it give you the same error.
5. Read on the net that you have to edit a .ini file, and add the path to it. Alternatively, you can edit your system environment and add the path in there.. both options are ass shit.
6. Run Eclipse again, now it works. Except, no Android. Ok.
7. Download Android SDK. Install it.
8. Run the Android SDK .exe, download some of the packages you want. You need a package for each platform (i.e. Android 1.1, 1.5, etc.) you want to support.
9. Run Eclipse, notice you still can’t code for Android.
10. Goto help->install new software. Copy & paste a https:// site for android. Check some boxes, press some buttons, restart Eclipse.
11. Slit your wrists.

I mean, come on. This is ridiculous. Why does open source = difficult to use? Even if Eclipse, instead of giving a useless error, asked me for the path to the JRE and auto-updated it’s .ini file, I would be less upset. But alas, I am upset.