Six years ago I wrote a blog post about development utilities that I used on a day to day basis in VisualWorks. I stumbled across it in a Google search today and I thought it'd be interesting to contrast what I was using back then with their status today.

• UIPainter -- Almost nothing has changed with this part of the product since 2004. For the most part, it does its job fairly well, but I personally think it's starting to show a bit of ware and tear with age.
• ProgrammingExtensions -- This is as useful as it was back in 2004, specifically for the extension that lets you middle click on a widget and inspect it.
• Method-History -- this extension no longer works. This differed from the two built-in tools in that it monitored the system for changes and recorded them so you could find what changed quickly. We have two tools in the system, the first scans the changes file for the method in question and the other looks up store versions of the method. Squeak makes the changes file scan fast by indexing it - we do not. Still, all in all, I don't miss this tool - but I might consider re-introducing it as an extension to Searchlight one of these days.
• AutoComplete -- I haven't had an auto completer loaded in to my image in -years-. This is quite bizarre because I use them all the time when I'm working in other tools like Xcode of VirtualStudio. The state of the art here hasn't changed, but I suspect one of these days we may hook it up to the Searchlight database for faster suggestion searching.
• ExtraEmphasis -- This has slowly plodded along and will one day help push the state of text attributes forward in VisualWorks. For now, it's still in use by many people - but it's not in the base.
• MouseWheelX11 -- The bug was fixed, this package is obsolete.
• FileProgress -- This parcel is still around and it might be useful when you're copying files around. I haven't even thought of this thing since 2004 apparently.
• RBSUnitExtensions -- I actually use SUnitToo(ls) now because most of my tests are written on top of SUnitToo. This package is still around and works, but I prefer SUnitToo(ls) integration in to the code browser better.
• RBRegexExtensions -- I use this on a day to day basis. It's just one of those useful swiss army knives. I want to integrate this kind of capability in to WebVelocity.
• RBStoreExtensions -- I haven't used this in a long time. I use some internal tools we have here at Cincom which integrate in to our issue management system instead.
• SmaCC Runtime -- I haven't needed to load this in a long time. I prefer using PEGs now in Xtreams where I can. The PEG technology is behind the syntax highlighters in WebVelocity 1.1
• RBBytecodeTool -- Still the same as it was before. It's neat for learning how bytecodes are applied under the hood in VisualWorks but not really useful day to day.
• ThreePaneSelectorsBrowser -- I've had reports that this might be broken in the latest version of VisualWorks. I don't use it any more, I use Searchlight-Tools instead. It doesn't do quite the same job (allowing you to quickly see related methods to a search) but it does other things much better.
• RBCodeHighlighting -- This guy has been upgraded over the years and has many extensions to it - such as a spell checker!
• HyperRBCodeHighlighting -- This one fell off the wagon a while ago and hasn't had much love compared to the RBCodeHighlighting package.
• Arbor Hypertext -- Avoid if at all possible I'd say. This is oooolllddd tech. Heck we integrated URL navigation in to the comment panes a year or so back as part of the RBCodeHighlighting package and the base image.
• All Advanced Tools -- Same as it was before, the profiling tools are the most important part of this package set.
• ImageCompression -- Well it's there and I use it, but it's one of those tools that lives on the side of my packaging process. Set and forget.
• ThrottledCursor -- The bug was fixed, this package is obsolete.
• NewPrerequisiteEngine -- Integrated!, this package is obsolete.
• DMTrippyEnhancements -- I'm not sure if this is compatible any more, but it might be. It added an XML pane when you're inspecting XML dom nodes, which was neat and useful for me at the time.
• ExtraIcons -- Deprecated, new icons are integrated the whole environment.
• StackOverflow -- Still useful from time to time, especially when you're running code in a sandbox.
• NextVersionPundlePublishing -- I haven't looked at this in years, I don't even remember what problem it was trying to solve exactly.
• File Repository -- Defunct, file versioning is supported by Bundles, however that support is pretty awful. Personally, I'd just use svn, git or mercurial now.
• LearningMenus -- It did its job when I made it, data discovered with it was used to enhance the product as a whole over several years. We may resurrect this when designing new UIs from time to time.
• SpsMergeToolMods -- Defunct, there are a whole new set of tools for merging and changes in the product now.
• AddInstVarAtCompileTime -- Merged a long time ago.
• ProportionalTabs -- Perhaps this might be useful to people still, but I haven't seen the issue it was addressing in a while now. It may have been the kinds of UIs I was making back then had a lot of tabs, but that doesn't bother me much these days.
• RBDiffs -- Integrated.
• RB_Tabs -- Not integrated, but really I think this type of functionality should be in the product.
• BuffersAreBack -- I guess this is still relevant, if you want 'old style' buffers in the RB - the RB already has buffers though and they work just fine.