I have both Visual Blitz and Protean and I can say this: Protean has more gadgets, but Visual Blitz is more straight-forward. With Protean It's not as easy to look around the screen and see all the globals and constants in your code and so on.
At the moment I'm working in the Protean BlitzMax beta and works pretty well (crop circles around the default IDE) but if eddy added BlitzMax compatibility into Visual Blitz, I'd switch to that in an instant. Coding in BlitzMax is alien to me as it is, and not using the same editor and interface that I'm used to with Blitz3D and BlitzPlus doesn't help me in the least. Not that I could be totally productive in BMax anyway, but it would really be great if we saw more familiar IDEs that we've known over the years work for the new Blitz language so the Windows crowd isn't as tense and stiff while getting accustomed to the new syntax and the OOP elements.
At the moment I'm working in the Protean BlitzMax beta and works pretty well (crop circles around the default IDE) but if eddy added BlitzMax compatibility into Visual Blitz, I'd switch to that in an instant. Coding in BlitzMax is alien to me as it is, and not using the same editor and interface that I'm used to with Blitz3D and BlitzPlus doesn't help me in the least. Not that I could be totally productive in BMax anyway, but it would really be great if we saw more familiar IDEs that we've known over the years work for the new Blitz language so the Windows crowd isn't as tense and stiff while getting accustomed to the new syntax and the OOP elements.