You can now compare the Swing JMC system with the WPF and Qt equivalents. These Windows programs are beta quality and not feature complete. The big problem here is of course that the latest version of JmediaPane is not available to anyone outside the big castle surrounded by fire breathing dragons. And therefore bug reports and general feedback is just a colossal waste of time.

And while I'm talking about wasting time. Why on earth is there no web version of the Java Store ? The website store.java.com is just a stupid promo site. Imagine a world where we had something called web servers that where indexed by something called search engines and people could link, using something called URL's, to content that was interesting to them. Instead of trying to compete with the real world, Sun developers have created their very own VB5 client connected to the mother-ship computer. Because everyone knows "that client" and "what they used" and many other VB5 clients that served "some company" in 1997.

But what really gets me is that Sun makes a big stink about the fact that the store is free for consumers. The word free is even in bold on the Java Store homepage. It sort of feels like the people behind this project are unaware of what a fancy store actually -is-. Maybe Sun employees are all warehouse club members who purchase 700 liters of generic Coca Cola once a year ? Is Sun really trying to be the Costco of software ? How much is a pallet of software going for these days anyway ?

User experience doesn't mean "hire some designers". It means embrace and evolve the product on company time, even when that means pissing people off. But those people better not be external developers during decision making time. You can piss people off, but only after having brainwashed them with snazzy effects and one dollar bills. Quarters only work with vending machines. Developers have standards.

Posted by JP at 09:22 AM | Permalink

Testing out the new Substance 5.3 Gemini theme (SubstanceGeminiLookAndFeel). Looks pretty good. Now supported through executable parameter -Xgemini.

Posted by JP at 01:05 AM | Permalink

This is the latest MP prototype. Since JmediaPane is nowhere, I'm experimenting with forms and other boring things. Everything is scalable and the application can be broken down into small visual parts without compromising usability.

I'm using MigLayout for forms, CardLayout BorderLayout FlowLayout GridLayout BoxLayout AssemblyBoxLayout for center panels and Teppefall Layout assemblies make up each individual panel. I then just update one panel at a time in TL. Most of the layout code was written almost two years ago, but TL makes reuse very simple.

The clue behind this application is that almost all the UI layout code is in XML. I just use TL for visual and i18n updates. The idea that JavaFX syntax will make layout easier sounds completely delusional to me. The reason people use XML is because XML is a data format. My TL assemblies are just like Apple's NIB/XIB. And Teppefall Hybrid is sort of my version of Cocoa NSApplication.

The text should probably be a little bigger though. Swing application text looks tiny compared to WPF.

Posted by JP at 12:36 AM | Permalink