Eitan Suez's Blog

March 2005 Archives

My Extended Java Family

"The world has changed so much since I was a child." I used to hear my parents or grandparents say such things. I never thought that the day would come where this statement would be coming out of my mouth. We all know much progress had taken place in the 20th century, after all. You'd always hear statements such as "there was no television at the time, we listened to the radio." Now I get to say to my kids "we had no computers back then, there was no internet." I prefer this one: "there was no cyberspace, we actually spent time in 3D space." :-)

In this time one of the most pronounced changes I see is how diverse we have become. This is especially the case in the United States. So many of the people I meet are Americans, but they have accents. We're all "from somewhere else" and yet, we're all American. I believe this trait we have is an asset. It allows us to feel kinship with people from everywhere. No one is _really_ that foreign to us.

The reason I bring this up is that Java has shown us that many of us, irrespective of where we live, have a common passion in programming. On java.net and on the JUGs community mailing lists we often hear people talk about "my JUG in India," or "at my JUG in Warsaw.." Some recent threads on the JUG leaders mailing list represented folks from Poland, Russia (St. Petersburg), Norway, Brazil, the USA, France, Java (the Island) and many more places. What a delight just to be listening in on this channel!

Separately in the USA, the No Fluff Just Stuff series of Symposia for 2005 has begun. I had the pleasure to visit JUG members from Milwaukee and Philadelphia thus far. This weekend I'm looking forward to meeting JUGnauts in St. Louis.

Thanks to java.net I've had the chance to virtually meet with all kinds of people who are vocal about our community. People such as Bruno Souza from Brazil and Totto from Norway, people such as Joshua Marinacci, David Walend, and Daniel Steinberg.

So to all of those people who were forward-thinking and took the initiative to help create the java.net community I would like to sincerely say "Thank you." But in fact, the reason java.net exists is thanks to all of us. Community systems such as java.net are a reflection of the thousands of peole who each contribute a small part to a greater whole. The java.net front page is a great example of that: it aggregates individual webloggers pieces together with information from the various java.net projects and communities, comments from the forums, events information, articles, and news. So ultimately what makes our community work is all of us. Bruno Souza says it better than I do: "you are part of this, you're doing this too, without you, there would be no community".

Eitan's Big Rant of the Year

Why is right-clicking such a foreign notion to millions of people who use computers every day and who have been using them for at least a decade??? This drives me nuts! I can't tell you how many man-hours have been spent on developing desktops, but I know it's a little more than a lot.

Every Operating System desktop behaves this way: Windows, MacOS, Gnome and every other X11 Window manager. There's an icon that represents a file or folder or an application. You can right-click on it and whatever actions (read: methods) you want to perform (read: invoke) on that icon (read: Object) appear for you to choose from. God forbid we use "OO" terms because they're "too technical" for lay people to understand.

What gives?? The truth is that most non-programmers I know don't know how to work their desktops. What does that say about us humans? I don't know if my mind will allow me to go there. How much time and effort will we spend to give end users a more "intuitive" way to run our applications?? In the medical industry apparently some are saying that they've given up on doctors learning to type. So they devised for them hand-writing recognition technology. We're no less guilty. How many man-hours are wasted making your web-app Microsoft compatible? It's as if there are no other browsers out there, or maybe they're too expensive? .. or not intuitive?

So, combine the fact that people don't know how to use their desktop with the fact that the desktop is the only application of its kind. That is, it's the only Object Oriented UI ever built (of course, this is a slight exageration, but it helps make the point). And you have the answer to the question at the beginning of this rant: no one understands right-clicking. It's not "intuitive." What a shame. What a shame.

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