Editor's Daily Blog: Helping your users

Did you ever use software that reports back that a file can not be found when you can see it right there on your desktop? How about software that thinks it is helping you by formatting your quotes or your text in ways that you thought you had turned off? In the first case your software isn't being helpful enough and in the second case it is being too helpful. How do you strike the right balance?

In Also in Java Today , knowing when two items are the same can be difficult for a small desktop application. The problem, as Brent Simmons writes, is that users complain But I can tell that it's about the same thing. In his case, he is talking about the grouping of news items by his RSS reader NetNewsWire. This essay is a good look at the other side of "but can't you just . . ." suggestions. It's also a good example of not adding a feature until you can get it right. Finally, the comments at the bottom of the page are as much a part of the post as Brent's initial observations.

Sometimes it seems to me that Google has reached this level of knowing what I really mean. Early this morning I was following up on last night's talk at the Cleveland JavaSIG and needed to search for more information on metadata. Somehow Google knew that I wasn't ready to deal with this yet.

In the other "Also in Java Today" item, Cedric Beust writes about what he considers to be The "Call super" antipattern. His example is taken from the use of JUnit where your code and third party code needs to remember to call super.setUp() at the beginning of the setUp() method. He asks "How come your test methods need to follow a certain naming pattern in order to be picked up by JUnit, but the rule is different for setUp/tearDown?" A lengthy discussion of both sides of the issue follows in the talkback.

Yesterday I suggested "We could probably put together a pretty cool conference built from talks rejected by JavaOne." I've watched a lot of conversation on this and one of my favorite non-confrontational suggestions was "what about a java.net stage or room at JavaOne where we could host 15 minute talks made up from those rejected this year." We could let the community manage the program through online forums. All we need is the space and the permission.

Fifteen minutes doesn't seem like a lot of time, but that is often the time allotted at professional meetings to present a year's worth of research. The goal isn't to cover everything, but to cover enough that others want to follow up later. We could set up a project that could hold the presentations and facilitate a conversation around them. Just thinking out loud.

In his blog entry The Best Language for I18n John O'Connor is asking an honest to goodness question. In today's Weblogs he asks you to "magine that internationalization and localization are one of the top priorities of your new development project. Can a specific programming language and platform make it easy to solve i18n problems such as user interface translation, date and number formatting, and character set conversions? If so, what would that platform be?"

Ed Burns stirs up a reaction in his post on Dick Grimes's .NET Farewell. He argues that Microsofts move to VB.Net " was marketing driven, and resulted in the creation of a backwards incompatible language, with an implementation of inconsistent quality, that is marketed as being backwards compatible with VB. "

In Projects and Communities, from the Jini Community: the transcript from the January 11 online chat with Jini technology architect Bob Scheifler and marketing manager Jennifer Kotzen is now available. In it, they discuss new features in starter kit 2.0, using Jini with J2ME, and Jini's open-source future.

The Wired article Wireless Gaming Held Hostage describes the coming boom in mobile gaming in the U.S., and the challenges posed by inconsistent billing systems and carriers largely unwilling to work with independent game developers.

In today's Forums Zixle writes "Thankfully GridBagLayout has recently been optimized! It's in the 1.6 builds now. As to examples, yes, we need to ship better examples that more closely match that of how we want people to use our apis. It's something we see as very important and hope to do it in 1.6."

In the Eight years thread MThornton writes "That JSR-203 [ More New I/O APIs for the JavaTM Platform (NIO.2)] is slipping yet again to Dolphin is extremely disappointing. Is it really that hard or is it just lack of priority?"

In today's java.net News Headlines :

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March 14-17, 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

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Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment

Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter, who designed and implemented Java annotations for 1.5, both joined Google after that JDK release. Since searching for "Java annotations" now returns a normal list of links, perhaps they were having some fun the day you did your search!

Posted by: tball on March 10, 2005 at 10:51 PM

java.net at JavaOne

For my talk, I'd hoped to get a good conversation of java.net developers going. I'm not sure 15 minutes at a podium would do. However, a room with not too much background noise for an hour (and maybe a cooler of the local beer) would be perfect.

Dave

Posted by: dwalend on March 11, 2005 at 01:13 PM

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