More Java laments, remarkable this time b/c it comes from the horse's mouth:

So, continuing on Monday's rant, how do we get folks lined up around the block waiting for [Java's next] release? I've been looking at Mac Tiger and wondering about the lessons there for the Java community. One of the things we're missing are showcase desktop applications.

I know - you can name a dozen of them off the top of your head. How many of them are used by non-geeks? How many of those are applications we are really proud of? Each year at it's developer conference Apple gives design awards to well designed and well implemented applications in a variety of categories. People care and people compete - where are our serious Java design awards?

He continues:

Developers are writing these like mad and even though Tiger's been released for less than a week, non-technical consumers are using them. This could have been a Java-first release and people could have been writing widgets for the Java platform. Sun bought Watson from Karelia last year. Watson performed many of the same functionality as Dashboard in a framework that was organized a bit differently. Imagine how Watson would look if you add in project looking glass technology so the widgets rotate and store away nicely. You'd also have to bring Java's HTML and CSS and JavaScript displaying capabilities past the Netscape 4.7 days. Developers would have been writing Watson widgets and end users would have had a compelling reason to care that their computer had Java inside.

Well said. I'm not sure if "Java Dashboard" apps would have met the same success as the intra-OS version in OS X 10.4, but it couldn't've hurt. The reference to Watson is well done; that's a real dropped ball by Sun.

But the bottom line is that Dashboard apps can be written in Java, and there's nothing stopping Sun from extending JDashboard apps, written to hit a certain API, to Windows in a month.

Get on it, Sun.

Here's some more from the same source, from that Monday rant:

Chris has often pointed out that Java on the desktop can not be considered successful as long as our success stories are IDEs and other developer-centric apps. Where are the cool things for the kids? Java is ten years old - the desktop should be rocking.

Well said.