Now that 2009 is almost at a close, I thought I’d share my retrospective. Based on the number of comments and hits to our web pages, the most popular topics this year were platform issues and news, Emacs, and GUIs. It’s no surprise that the best received and viewed posts pertained to the MATLAB Editor, since Ken and I both worked primarily on the Editor during the past year. Your feedback has been great and learning about what interests our audience helps us decide what to write about. Our three most popular posts of 2009, in terms of comments:

1. Pouncing on Snow Leopard
2. It’s the Little Things That Count
3. Tab to Narrow Completions

We’ve heard you loud and clear about platform fidelity and competitiveness with other Editors. I think we made great strides in those areas in 2009, and have wonderful things planned for 2010.

I also learned that free t-shirts are not a good motivator for getting responses. I think next time I’ll try free copies of Emacs or chocolate peanut butter.

The big surprise for me is the rate at which new comments continue to come in our uitable post. Well that, and ending up the owner of this blog barely a year after Ken and I officially took it over. Next year I plan on having the same set of regular guest posters as well as some new faces to help out with the articles.

At the beginning of the year, Ken and I made some new year’s resolutions. I am going to give Ken a check-plus on his resolution. He nailed it with the new search field, the more Mac-like tabs, and getting guest posts regularly on Windows and Macintosh. I’m going to give myself a check. Overall I think I made improvements in our code base, but although I did slim down a number of widgets, we added a lot of features so the code footprint did increase in our area. As for useful tips and tricks, I think I did well covering using java, organizing files, and Gui internationalization.

Have a good New Year’s and a happy and healthy 2010.