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It's not like we weren't warned. Lots of people in the community tried to tell us that this was a bad idea. But somehow, despite being an ostensibly community-driven organization, somewhere along the line we learned to tune out naysayers from the community. ... I've been thinking a lot about the fundamental disconnect between the developers and the users. I think it comes down to: Software developers have a perverse habit of thinking of updates/new releases as a good thing. ... Only after I heard from dozens of different users that the rapid release process had ruined Firefox did I finally get it through my thick skull: releasing an update is practically an act of aggression against your users...
So many companies release updates which radically change the interface for no significant gain -- they seem to be moving sideways rather than forward, changing things around for the sake of change.... I've come to the extremely humbling realization athat the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often! Let it remain stable long enough for us to learn it and get good at it. There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now have to relearn.
Bold emphasis mine.
For Firefox extension developers (and I've done a little), the real take-home is here: "Worse yet, we didn't do enough to preserve add-on compatibility, making the updates extremely disruptive to people who depended on certain add-ons; and we kept going with our old version-numbering scheme even though the meaning of the numbers had changed completely, leading to mass confusion."
Okay, also useful (this is becoming a "quotes to self" post): "Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need."
The post is more than worth reading for anyone working with software development.
(discovered via link shared in the Real Software blog)
I don't think Apple is really worried about losing mindshare in the Java video playback front. Java 7 has already promised on2 video codec support so playback in Java is a non-issue. ffmpeg, FOBS, FMJ, etc... are useless when it comes to meaningful editing so the question of editing support is the only meaningful one worth asking. ... At this point, certainly, relying on Apple for Quicktime Java support would not be wise.
What's this on2 video codec we're talking about? I've been out of the hands-on loop long enough not to know about JavaFX. I can't say I completely understand what it's supposed to do (though JWebKit was supposed to follow it, and hasn't), but it appears to be QT4J's functional successor.
Problem is, this would be a real bear to distribute, and the Mac sys reqs ain't exactly middlin'. Both make it less attractive than a well-supported QT4J (which we all know doesn't now exist, if it ever did).
Microsoft Windows:
* Processors: Intel Pentium 4, Intel Centrino, Intel Xeon, or Intel Core Duo (or compatible) 1.8 GHz minimum * Operating systems: Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (certified for 32-bit editions) * Memory: 512 MB of RAM (1 GB recommended) * Disk space: 256 MB free disk space * Web Browsers: Internet Explorer 6 minimum, FireFox 2.0 minimum * Java SE Development Kit (JDK): JDK 6 Update 7 minimum (JDK 6 Update 13 recommended) The JDK installation includes the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). * Apple QuickTime Player: 7.5.5 minimum is required to run the JavaFX Mobile Emulator, which is currently available only on the Microsoft Windows platform. System restart is required after QuickTime installation.
Apple Macintosh:
* Processor: Dual-Core Intel, PowerPC G5 * Operating system: Macintosh OS X 10.4.10 minimum * Memory: 512 MB of RAM (1 GB recommended) * Disk space: 256 MB of free disk space * Web Browsers: Firefox 3.0 minimum, Safari 3 minimum * Java SE Development Kit (JDK): JDK 5 Update 13 (version 1.5.0_13) minimum (Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Release 7 or Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2 or later) The JDK installation includes the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
There's also some talk about how JavaFX is being pimped hand-in-hand with Netbeans, kinda like the essentially Netbeans-only VB-like GUI RAD I blogged about a long time ago and whose name I forget. I'm not quite sure I get the Netbeans infatuation. It's a nice dev environ, but I like Eclipse more. I'm still programming in Java, right?
So I'm not sure how much JavaFX is tied to Netbeans, as some conspiracy theorists trumpet, but I'm not completely sold that there's no proverbial synergy driving them either. I hate it when companies try to sell dancing moons and call them shovels (the tool du jour).
I was recently at a blog I wanted to add to the the RSS roll, but I couldn't find an RSS or XML link, nor could I immediately figure out what brand o' blog it was, as a number have standard ways of accessing feeds if you massage the URL a bit.
So I figured, what the heck, let's paste the home URL into Google Reader and see what happens.
POOF. Took a while, but it's in the roll. That's how an RSS reader should work.
Mr. Beal's cleverly named businessweek.com piece, Why Chrome Won't Crash Windows, misses a key point in understanding Chrome's importance. First, a quote:
It's our infatuation with the Google brand, more than the technology inside, that will boost Chrome's market share and further extend Google in our daily Web activities. As for being a Windows or Internet Explorer killer, don't count on it.
Did Gmail kill Hotmail? Will Google Docs kill Office? Did Google kill Yahoo? How about Google Reader -- it's killed nearly every stand-alone RSS reader I've tried.
If Chrome can extend Gmail, Reader, Docs, Maps, search, Scholar, Books, etc etc etc onto your desktop, the OS will finally become a commoditized complement. This kills Windows. Rather, it negates the advantage one OS has over another, in large and almost exclusive part.
Again, Google is with chrome making Java's play, and they are, to date, doing it successfully. There's more than just a cute icon to be gleaned from Google's portrait of Java applets as a bunch of dancing moons. What Google is saying is that where Sun failed so miserably and laughably in Web 1.0, Google's winning in version two.
Google is killing the OS in ways Sun wanted to with Java and couldn't. It'll be interesting to see if Google can succeed.
The big news of the day? Google announces Google Chrome, a WebKit (yes the very same Webkit that Safari uses) based-browser.
So far, my favorite part of the comic is the little dancing moon on the bottom of page 13. Ain't he cute?! Man, I loved Java applets; all that potential, all the fear from MS, and what does it produce? Dancing moons. Very nice.
So what's Google's angle, other than potentially saving paying out a tiny bit in Google search bar licensing fees? Hrm... I do wonder how much more information this browser will provide Google that they don't/can't get from clients currently. And if I have to hear about one more different brand o' Javascript engine coming out, I'm going to puke.
EDIT: Well, here's some of what's potentially being phoned, and also how Google hopes to help make crrrrrrrazy cash.
And here's our favorite dancing moon, used for good effect elsewhere in the comic. (The comic, btw, is especially geeky. Does that primarily reflect who is supposed to be using it, or is that who is supposed to start programming for it? I couldn't finish the comic "for fun," so hopefully I didn't miss too much.)
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