James McGlinn has posted some of his thoughts on the recent announcement from Zend concerning the "open to the public" beta they've moved their Zend Neon IDE into.

First impressions were that the interface is more refined than Zend Studio's chunky Java widget set, but there is a performance hit - at least the first time it took considerably longer to get started than the current Zend Studio 5.5 (this is on my daily workhorse, an aging but reliable PowerBook G4).

He talks about the workspace setup (Eclipse is familiar to most), how the editor flows, features it includes - like code folding and auto-complete - and the Code Analyzer feature that helps you keep track of potential bugs in your code.