Was reading up on Jamie Zawinski, quite some war stories he has in the the netscape dorm.
Also came across the comments in the Netscape Navigator source code before it was made public. Check it out at censorzilla! I most definitely am not allowed to comment like this !
I’ve seen way too much time being lost in UI mockups. You do your careful mocking in HTML/Photoshop/Swing and then you send it across for review. Now they want it changed and again you spend some more time changing it.
I deal with swing based screens mostly and I have to draw it on paper or explain it to the graphic designer so that it can be drawn again in Photoshop. I’ve got to put this in a design document and send this in for review. I can even mock them up myself fairly easily in any GUI designer. There is even a look and feel called the Napkin Look and feel so that it gives the impression that your screen is a mockup and not functional. While I like the concept and the look and feel is way too cool (but a overkill), I’ve tried another experiment this time. I drew the screens on paper scanned them in and stuck them in the document (you can use a fax machine instead of the scanner too). It was well received and nobody objected, not to mention that the time was saved in not waiting for the designer person 
. I can update them much faster too and it really looks like a mockup when you draw them using pencils. Of course for a change I did write legibly 
Lately I’ve been looking at UML modelling tools. Tried quite a few of them (freeware, shareware etc.). Even downloaded the new freely available Java Studio Enterprise, but didn’t like the fact that I had to leave Eclipse 
. Now I don’t have to thanks to EclipseUML from Omondo.
This is what plugin architecture is all about !! I have used the Free Edition so far and it’s amazing. No major hiccups, would have liked to install through an update site, but their installer was OK too.I liked the fact that they have maintained the overall look and feel and icon set remains faithful to Eclipse. Auto-layout is not very smart though and the export is to SVG only (the commercial edition add more export formats). I like the fact that I can version-control this along with my source code so that I can keep them updated so that there is no “lag” between design and development. I am going to go all crazy with use cases and sequence diagrams too
If all goes well I want to suggest that we use this plugin in all our teams and maybe I can push for the commercial version too.
PS : I am using w.bloggar to write this post and the spell check suggests “unholy” as a correction for UML appropriate you say !!!
Well now that you can get a wordpress account without an invite I got one ! But I would like to move all my posts from blogger to here (not that there are lots ). I guess this should be a default feature for all services that are launched nowadays. I mean the whos-who of the blogosphere are already blogging and if you want them to switch to your service, then there should be a “import from service”. I read here that it was a planned feature, hopefully we will see it soon
I wanted to add the subscribe buttons for Google today and found the howto here. I created a new category for adding these buttons and followed the procedure. This did not work. It was showing the text and not the image. After some digging around I found that the “Show Image” needs to be enabled at the category level. So there you go, hope I saved someone else’s time
On my development box I was facing a weird problem of java (1.4.2_04) Timezone not being what it should be. The good part is that this is not happening on the client box. So all this was ok as the only place it was getting used was in the log4j logs I was just offsetting the time to my time in my head 
(Too lazy I know). But recently we were adding some code that was dependent on the timezone in that the time was the content of a mail sent to users and not everybody was prepared for my “mental offset” solution.
Googling for an answer I found this link http://minaret.biz/tips/timezone.html which describes the exact problem I had and a solution that works for me (export TZ=). I basically stuck this export TZ="whatever" to my bash profile.
Upgrading the java version to 1.5.0_02 doesn’t make a difference either and the Linux time zone is also set perfectly and the date command works as it should.
One thing I would like to add is that use the complete name “America/Los_Angeles” and not an ID like PST or JST. Setting the ID works for Java but the date command doesn’t get it, so if you have native apps then they would start acting up because of this.
Oh yeah, if I ever find out what the problem is to begin with, it will be posted here too 
for now this fix will have to make do.
Update: Check your /etc/localtime
Is there a Swing based Rich client implementation of the Petstore application or something similar? I wanted to see the J2EE design patterns and blueprints put to practice in a Swing based rich client. The blue prints at http://java.sun.com/reference/blueprints/ and http://corej2eepatterns.com/ primarily focus on Web based applications but other than Presentation Tier everything should remain the same for a Swing based one. Macromedia has done something similar http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/blueprint/, pretty neat. Guess I could get cracking on this one.
The Eclipse RCP does really look like the “Really cool Platform” that it’s been touted to be. I have been looking it into it on and off (read: every time somebody blogs about it or there is a eclipse release). I really wish that they had something like this for the average Swing Joe (like me).
Just thought of building a Outlook Express like application for reading the bloglines just as a quick hack project. But boy does it take a while to get off the ground. At work we already have a kind of framework that takes care of all the menu, status bar etc. well kind of. But if I start off from scratch (using all of JDNC and jgoodies) it would take me a couple of days just to get a decent skeleton in and then finally to the nitty-gritty. As opposed the RCP seems to provide all this out of the box and with all the run in background coolness (think it’s the Job API). All this and plus some more.This really should have been done swing already, considering that it’s been around like forever, maybe everybody has developed something proprietary in-house.
I hear that Java is making a come back in the desktop market (well we’ve been in here for quite some time), but without such a framework I am not sure it will sustain the interest. The whole point is to be quick off the ground, lots of apps => lots of source code etc. ! I think where eclipse did right was come out with quick results to sustain the interest that it had generated and has kept it going. I don’t say there are no efforts here JDNC is doing quite a lot of work and they have a Action framework that seems to have the workings that can be used in a contributable framework like in eclipse/RCP but leaving the actual work for somebody else or as a TBD might not workout.
Now being a Swing’er for life I am actually considering looking into the whole deal. Not sure how long and how much effort will be needed and more than that how much of a mind-set change will this need (I have my share of FUD being from the other “side”), but about a year ago I had persuaded my organization to switch to Eclipse as the standard IDE (after using it for 2 years myself) as the standard IDE from textpad’s, notepad’s and some other IDE’s in the market and it was such a huge success.
Now I am out looking for material, I see a lot of tutorials(plug-ins/RCP/SWT/JFace), videos but a lot of it is scattered around, now wishing for some more would be plain evil now would it ?
