Surfacing

Life after IBM

My tenure at IBM came to an end last August when I accepted the position of Program Manager at Embarcadero Technologies to lead the development of next-generation Eclipse-based products targeted to database developers. Good gig!

In a pleasant and touching surprise, I have been getting a lot of e-mail from readers of my blog inquiring how the new job is going.

To quote the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, "my life got flipped turned upside down" since the big job move:

• There is a huge corporate cultural change when you go from a company with 300,000 employees to a company with 300 employees.
• I gave up my thinkpad for a Dell.
• My Lotus Notes is now called Outlook.
• I now use this thing called JIRA for bug tracking.
• My new favorite acronyms are SQL, DDL and DML.
  
• I lead a distributed team of 30 developers and QAs.
  
• I work 23.5 hours/day - on average. I always make time for Wheel of Fortune.
• Working downtown Toronto is fun. I was on the cusp of becoming "too suburban."
• Eclipse is a great platform. I have always known that.
  
• I have noticed recently that Eclipse as an IDE is too project-centric. Have you tried opening a simple file for editing in an empty workspace?
• I am the reigning office Bocce Ball champion.

Pilgrimage to EclipseCon

I am so filled with the joy of EclipseCon that I cannot contain it, for EclipseCon is the best organized (and best-catered) conference I have been to.

Looking at the 2008 lineup, the conference program looks pretty solid, and more importantly, it seems to be devoid of those awful panel "discussions". My prayers have been answered!

As for my participation in the conference, I will be co-presenting two tutorials:
Plug-in Development 101: The Fundamentals
Plug-in Development 201: Rich Client Applications

If you are new to Eclipse or plug-in development, these tutorials are a must.

Also, if you would like to see what I have been up to lately, drop by the Embarcadero booth in the Exhibition Hall for a chat, a demo (and possibly free stuff).


PDE Does ...?

My new job takes me to interesting and beautiful destinations.



If you can name the city and the landmark in this photo, find me at EclipseCon and I will buy you a drink with an umbrella in it (or an item of equal or lesser value).

End of (My IBM) Days

Bye, Bye, Bye

Last week, I sent out the following announcement to my colleagues at IBM:

"After 7 years and 6 solid Eclipse releases, the time has come for me to leave IBM to pursue other opportunities.

My last day at the Toronto Lab is Friday August 17.

...

I leave IBM happy for the time I spent here, grateful for all the opportunities I have been given, and proud to be associated with such talented friends and colleagues.

Thank you for being part of it all.

Wassim Melhem."

PDE All Grown Up

I have been working on PDE since the Eclipse 2.0 release, and became the component lead at the beginning of the RCP movement, early in the Eclipse 3.0 cycle.

Year after year, the PDE New and Noteworthy feature list has been long and distinguished (3.0 - link to the N&N list no longer found on eclipse.org, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3), and PDE has come a long way in term of stability and performance.

PDE gets a lot of positive press and we are always thankful and flattered when that happens. To me, the most memorable one came in a blog entry entiled "PDE All Grown Up" a couple of years ago. It is my favorite because it is not over the top, it uses a great metaphor comparing PDE's growth to that of a rambunctious teenager, and it chronicles how we won over the heart and mind of a plug-in developer.

Given PDE's "No Developer Left Behind" policy, we always do all we can to accommodate and please every developer. Note that our effort should not be confused with the similarly-named, yet failed, "No Child Left Behind" program ;)

A Gang of Four

At IBM and particularly working on Eclipse, I got to work with some of the best people. For my farewell tour this week, I went to Texas for a few days to spend quality time with the Austin chapter of the Equinox and PDE teams.

With a traditional leafy backdrop, this is a picture of me with three of Eclipse's finest. From left to right: Thomas J. Watson (not to be confused with the other Thomas J. Watson), Chris Aniszczyk, unshaven/overdressed man, new father Brian Bauman.

Chapter Two

On Monday, I start my new job working as a program manager at an Eclipse add-in provider member company, where I will be leading a new commercial Eclipse-based product.

I plan to continue blogging, but with some emphasis on the challenges that I will be facing in my new role. If that gets boring, I could always go back to questioning the authority. That's always fun :)

As for my involvement with PDE, I will remain a committer, but largely in an advisory role. Time permitting, I plan to code from time to time. I will also be attending selected conferences in the next year, with OS Summit Asia being the next likely event.

Onward and Upward

Thank you for choosing PDE. Your productivity is our top priority.

PDE Does Cairo

A Right-to-Left Crisis

Every year around May, when we think we are almost done with development, multi-language testing starts and we get bombarded with Bidi bugs. Bidi bugs are inherently difficult to address, mainly because very few developers can read/write Arabic or Hebrew.

Do Arabic developers really use the Arabic version of Eclipse for Java/plug-in development or do they prefer the English one? Is it worth the investment to spend time and resources on translating components like PDE and JDT into other languages?

I am a native Arabic speaker. Even though I am not necessarily a poet, I can read and write the language pretty well. However, I am not convinced at all that an Arabic IDE is necessarily useful for Arabic developers. After all, the Eclipse javadoc is entirely in English and does not get translated, the plugin.dtd tells you that you should only use the US-ASCII character set for plug-in IDs, etc.

Here is circumstancial evidence that proves my claim . It is a screenshot from a bug reported on Eclipse 3.3:
On the Target Platform preference page, arguably the most popular preference page for plug-in developers, the parenthesis for each of the labels in the tree are misaligned. If the Arabic version Eclipse is used by Arabic Eclipse developers, how did this problem go unnoticed since Eclipse 1.0?

So here is my theory: "While it makes perfect sense to translate, for example, a banking Eclipse-based RCP application into other languages. I am not so sure translating an IDE is all that useful."

Because I was in a Bidi kind of mood, I thought it would be good to take a trip to Egypt -- as an Eclipse envoy to the middle East, if you may. So I went.

A Nile view

While in Cairo, I stayed in the lap of luxury in a high-rise condo with a Nile view to the East. The picture is taken early in the morning from my balcony. The bridge shown is the University Bridge.

To the Pyramids, To the Pyramids
My second day there, we went on a two-hour camel ride to the pyramids. To my surprise, there were nine pyramids, the three big ones I knew about and six much smaller, less photographed ones.

Cairo in June is very humid and the humidity was not very kind to my hair or my nephew's.

Riding a camel is substantially more difficult than riding an elephant, particularly as the camel stands up and sits down. But it is so much fun once you get the hang of it. The camel also goes into a nice jogging pace, which was exhilirating.

Finally, this is the gentleman whose job was to make sure the camel does not kill me ;) The camels love the camera...

Back to Reality

Cairo was the last stop in the PDE tour. I flew home on Lufthansa (in support of Peter's employer). It was good to be back in my house. Next day, I had to mow the lawn which had grown to 5 feet after a two-week absence.

PDE Does BugDay

I am so filled with the joy of BugDay that I cannot contain it. BugDay takes place this Friday and I am hoping that it will serve to prove that contributing to Eclipse is not that hard.

Bugs in the Bugzilla inbox come in varying degrees of difficulty. Whatever your Eclipse level is, you should be able to find a suitable bug and fix it in one day.

In the PDE/UI inbox, we have flagged 15 bugs with the bugday keyword. A few have already been addressed because we have keeners in the community who could not wait until Friday ;)

Take a look at the bugs and claim the one you like. If you see something that is not flagged and you want to do it, by all means go ahead and claim it. If there is a bug that bothers you for which there is no bug report open, report the bug and fix it.

Incentive
In addition to getting credit in the bug report and the code, PDE is offering an extra incentive.
We are planning to add pictures of BugDay contributors to our Committers page. We have one guideline though: The picture must have a leafy background and/or a background depicting patio furniture.

July 27
Friday is my day off, but I plan to work to make sure we have a successful BugDay. A big thanks to Chris for organizing this event.

PDE Does Zürich

Next stop in our recent PDE tri-continent tour was the beautiful city of Zürich, home of Erich Gamma and the JDT team. Consistently ranked as the most livable city in the world, it is worth mentioning that it is also one of the most expensive cities in the world. You know there is no messing around in Zürich when you see that the ATM does not dispense less than 100 CHF (~$87 CAD).

Zürich - now with 20% less bustle
The IBM lab has been fabled in story and song as "an office overlooking charming old-town Zürich, with the bustle of medieval commerce outside and the thump of techno from the record store downstairs."

This description may have been true in the '90s, but it is evident in the pictures below that the hustle and bustle levels have been degrading steadily over the past few years, a fact that Al Gore would probably attribute to global warming.

A Conversation with Erich
I met with Erich to discuss the state of Jazz, but that's all top-secret stuff, so I can't give any details ;)

We also discussed the PDE 3.3 features, and Erich expressed his fondness of the new cheat sheet editor and the command composer.

Seeing how easy it has become to author cheat sheets, I think it should be a requirement for all EclipseCon tutorial exericses next year to be in the form of cheat sheets. No more MS Word docs please.

Note that the "We love the new PDE cheat sheet authoring tools" club already has an Austin chapter. If you would like to start a PDE club in your home town, let us know ;)

The Pink House
While in Zürich, we stayed in the lap of luxury at the house of JDT/UI's Martin Aeschlimann, a contemporary and a good friend. Here is a picture of us outside of what is rumored to be the only pink residence in all of continental Europe.

Next Stop: Africa

After two days in Zürich, we took the train back to Frankfurt where Chris and I parted ways. He headed back to the United States and I flew to Africa for the "PDE Does Cairo" adventure.

PDE Does Heidelberg

En route to Zurich in our recent PDE tri-continent tour, Chris insisted on staying in the German town of Heidelberg. I believe his exact words were: "If we don't go to Heidelberg, I am going to die." So we went :)



It was a nice university town with a lot of young people walking around. It had a big castle and much like every other European town I have been to, "a river runs through it."

After a week of eating and no exercise in India, we worked out at the hotel gym and then went on a nice jog along the river.

"Free" Internet in Germany
Later that night, we both needed internet access. I wanted to fix a regression, and Chris wanted to see what every person on Earth is up to on Facebook.

Instead of paying 20 Euros/person for internet access at the hotel, Chris suggested we walk to one of the restaurants/bars downtown Heidelberg where we can enjoy a nice frosty beverage and where the "internet is free." I had my doubts about anything being free, but Chris had been there before and he knows everything, so we walked.

The rain started pouring and we had no umbrella, yet we kept walking. 25 minutes in the rain later, we got to a bar. We sat down to enjoy the free internet, and here is a picture of a very wet Chris looking perplexed when he realized that nothing is free in the world today.

As we walked back, a defensive Chris kept saying "But it was free last time. It was free". In a patronizing tone, I kept replying: "I am sure it was, Chris. I am sure it was."

Netbeans Getting More Popular

Have you been to a conference where some presenter asks to see a show of hands of how many people use Eclipse vs. Netbeans vs. IntelliJ vs. VI?

I have and the result is almost always the same. Hundreds of Eclipse users raise their hand and VI/Netbeans are at 4 or 5 people apiece.

Good news for Netbeans though. From my seat at JAX India the other day, I saw about 10 Netbeans users raise their hand (including 3 Sun Employees). So we are seeing an improvement there. The Eclipse count was still in the hundreds.

You have to give credit to the Netbeans evangelists (and EclipseZone) though for creating the illusion that the Eclipse-Netbeans competition is a dead heat.

Where Has the Innovation Gone?

A while back, our friends over at EclipseZone asked the musical question 'Where has the JDT innovation gone?'. I am not going to link to that thread because it was unfair, uninformed and a complete waste of time.

To anyone who asks: "Where is the innovation? Where is the innovation?", I say: "Here is your damn innovation!" :)

PDE Does India

The Conference

Eclipse Forum India came to a close on Thursday. Chris and I presented an 8-hour tutorial and it was packed, which confirms my theory that "Everybody Loves Plug-ins."

It is clear from the Q&A that Eclipse development is big in India. The questions were very advanced and they were non-stop. The coffee breaks were not much of a break, as the audience stormed the stage to ask more questions. It was a lot of fun.

On a personal level, the experience was pretty flattering. Some people had driven hours to come see Chris and myself talk. Many people in the audience were also familiar with our blogs and were looking forward to meet us in person.

By the end of the day, we were completely exhausted, but here is a picture of how fresh Chris and I looked like earlier in the day:



Eclipse Forum India was a very well-organized event. Thank you to Masoud, Dilip, Neeru and the rest of the JAX team for their hospitality and for going above and beyond to make sure we were well taken care of.

The Elephant Ride
One of the items on my "Things to do before I die" list is to ride an elephant, and this wish came true in India.
Here is Chris and I roaming the streets of Mysore on an elephant named "Ruby". The grin on my face says it all.

Pashminas, Pashminas, Pashminas

Having just won a $100,000 prize, Chris decided to blow all the prize money on pashminas. With the help of one of the local ladies, we went to one of the Bangalore shops, where we were knee-deep in shawls and where I learned that bartering is a blood sport.

This whole experience has been a blast.

THANK YOU, JAX INDIA

We are currently in Zurich, so stay tuned for the next installement of the "PDE Does ..." Series.

Indian Idol

I am in Bangalore for Eclipse Forum India 2007.

According to initial counts, 250 people have signed up for the workshops and there are 700 unique registrants for the main conference days.

So we should expect a pretty good turnout for the PDE workshop, since everybody loves plug-ins.

While in town, I am also looking forward to watching season 3 of Indian Idol. The bellman at my hotel tells me that this season we have two new judges and that one of them is guaranteed to be as mean and venomous as Simon Cowell.

The First 100 Days

The term of the new class of committer representatives officially started on April 1. To their credit, the reps had already established several channels of communication before the term even started.

To get the party started, I posted a few questions on the committer reps newsgroup today asking about their action plan for the near future.

Of course, for them to have an agenda that represents the committers' needs, we all have to chime in to provide input and feedback.

In an effort to initiate a dialogue, I asked the following questions:

1. What is the single most important issue that you would like to push for and bring up for debate in the first 100 days of your term (ie. in the first face-to-face board meeting)? Why do you feel it's so important?
2. If issue stated in question #1 was still unresolved at the end of the year, would you consider that to be a failed term? More generally, how do we (and you) quantitate success of a term?
3. Now that you have had some orientation by the Eclipse Foundation as to what role you are able to play, are there items that you listed on your nomination vision statement that you think is out of the scope of your responsibilities? Another way to ask the question would be: is the position so far what you thought it was going to be or were you in for a surprise?
4. Being a committer rep on the Board of Directors is a coveted position. You get to add 'Director of Eclipse Foundation' to your LinkedIn profile, you get to add it to your EclipseCon biography and you get a chance to start every conversation by saying "Now that I am on the board of directors..." and annoy the heck out of your co-workers. So in short, it must be a lot of fun :).Yet for some reason, it's clear that not too many committers care about that. The vote turnout is low and the nomination field was not very crowded. Why do you think that is and do you plan to do anything about it?

This should make for an interesting thread, but let's keep it in the newsgroup.

Pound For Pound

In a recent interview, in reference to the Eclipse Platform team, Mike Milinkovich was quoted as saying: "...pound for pound, I think it's one of the best software engineering teams on the planet."

While I certainly agree with Mike that we, the Platform team, have collectively gained some weight over the past few years (as it was evident at EclipseCon2007 last week), I still found it inappropriate for him to announce that fact in a press release.

One could argue that the Eclipse Foundation is partly responsible for that. At EclipseCon, they threw an awesome party for the committers and the community where almost $3,000 worth of carbs was consumed past 10 pm. According to the genius Dr Phil, you should not eat past 7 pm.

Also, have you heard of those things called 'cookies'? They are delicious!

I, for one, am really trying. I work out every day (as Wayne would attest), have gone completely off dairy this week and plan to eat a plum for breakfast every morning starting next Monday.

One would hope that the Eclipse Foundation would stand by us in thinness and in fat.

EclipseCon 2007 Post-Mortem

The Best Conference Ever
I have been to the Santa Clara Covention Center for non-EclipseCon and more expensive events (e.g., SDWest) and let me tell you, it's not the same. During EclipseCon week, everything is better and everything runs without a glitch. It is a smooth operation. A big thank you to the conference organizers for an amazing job.

OSGi For Dummies
It was a great idea to merge the OSGi developer conference with EclipseCon and I hope this trend continues. Generally though, I felt that a significant number of the conference attendees did not know how the two technologies related to each other.

It may be a good idea to have a plenary talk next year to educate the masses about OSGi and Eclipse. My choice to present such a plenary would be BJ Hargrave. He articulates those OSGi concepts perfectly and his voice projects very well. He also ought to write an "OSGi for Dummies' book.

A Panel without a Panel, a Point without a Counterpoint
One of the sessions I was most curious about was the What sucks about Eclipse panel. As much as I like healthy debates, I was afraid it would quickly turn into a complaint session about insignificant problems, rather than tackle big issues.

In fairness, the moderator was good, but I think the session was destined to fail before it even started. According to the abstract of this session, "the format of this panel is a little non-traditional. The audience are the panelists". I suspect it was difficult to assemble committers or project leads for the panel if the premise was to be ambushed by the community :)

So the audience brought up some good points, but there was no one in attendance that was knowledgeable enough to respond. So it left us all empty, and after a while the whole thing just felt awkward.

I blame Bjorn and Richard for voting for and accepting that submission. (I am kidding, please don't take the bait ;)

Web Track != WTP; Test and Performance Track != TPTP
The web development track was very heavy on the WTP. Similarly, the Test and Performance track seemed heavy on the TPTP content. I would have liked to see more variety in those two tracks as I am sure there is a lot of Web and test/performance-related work going on in the Eclipse space that is not directly coming out of these two projects.

By comparison, other tracks such as the C/C++, Java, and RCP tracks, had a very well-balanced program.

Tutorials - A Popularity Contest
I suggested to the program committee that, when it comes to tutorials, they should accept submissions based on what sells, not evenly distribute across tracks. A good, but certainly not the only, indicator would be to look at the big hits/misses of EclipseCon2006. Unfortunately, either no one listened, or I spoke up too late.

So we ended up with some tutorials about obscure topics that did not do well this year. In fact, some tutorials that did not do well in 2006 came back to the 2007 schedule with little or no change. There was no miraculous jump in their attendance count this year either.

It was a bit sad to walk outside a huge room and see less than 10 people in attendance. Of course, there was no such problem in the modeling, RCP and embedded tracks. They were packed.

I think some people on the program committee ought to do some soul searching (perhaps travel to Tibet, if it helps) and come up with a plan to not let this problem happen again.

Onward and Upward
EclipseCon2007 was a great event. Looking forward to next year.

Eclipse on Mac - Part Deux

The most popular post on my blog is by far the recent Eclipse on Mac discussion.

Yesterday, as a follow-up, Ken Gilmer posted an itemized list of things that bother him about running Eclipse on Mac, complete with screenshots.

Personally, I tend to stay away from any operating system that does not come out of the state of Washington. But for all you Mac users out there, take a look at Ken's post and let's have another interesting thread going :)

The Greatest Schism of All

I have recently voiced my dismay about EclipseZone running Netbeans ads.

While the criticism is, of course, justified, I may have been a little too hard on our friends over at EclipseZone.

After all, how would I, the community and the Eclipse Foundation react if Sun sponsored EclipseCon?

I am nothing if not reflective, introspective and contemplative; so here is how I imagine such a scenario would play out:

"The Eclipse Foundation director would announce the decision of Sun to sponsor EclipseCon on his blog. He would welcome Sun with open arms and reaffirm the respect we have for Netbeans and how competition has been healthy and good for both camps.

A Sun evangelist, most likely someone from Great Britain, would then post a comment on the director's blog thanking him for his kind words.

The story then gets picked up by ZDNet, where Drama lives. One can expect an over-the-top headline like 'Sun has made a major step toward healing the schism in the Java community, which is the biggest schism that humanity has seen since the schism of 1054."

It will be one big love fest.

Fast forward a week or two...

We wake up one day and we read some earth-shattering news that some random guy from Sioux City, Iowa has just switched back to Eclipse after trying the 3.3M5a milestone, or some single mother from Grand Rapids, Michigan just tried Matisse and liked what she saw.

At which point, bloggers on Planet Eclipse and Planet Netbeans pick up the groundbreaking stories and start interpreting those "honest evaluations". Enter EclipseZone with one of their inflammatory, yet well-intentioned, posts and we are back to square one.

The love fest is over."

Sounds about right? :)

Panel Best Practices

In the second installment of my "I am so filled with the joy of EclipseCon that I cannot contain it" series, I would like to discuss how much I am looking forward to attend this year's line-up of panels.

I am a big fan of the panel concept, but up until now I have never attended a panel that lived up to my expectations at any conference (EclipseCon or otherwise). I am hoping this year would be the exception.

So I compiled a list of factors that have contributed to my negative experience with panels and turned it into a list of Panel Best Practices. After all, if life gives you gator, make gatorade.

It is clearly not intended to be a Letterman-esque top ten list, particularly since it's not funny. I just happened to have 10 thoughts on the topic:

1. Limit the number of panelists to a maximum of 5. That should be sufficient to start and sustain a 45-minute discussion where everybody gets decent air time. No need to assemble a soccer team on stage.
2. When assembling a panel, make sure to invite people who are qualified to talk about the subject matter. At times last year, I kept thinking to myself: "Who are these people on stage and what makes them so qualified to talk about this topic?"
3. Panelists should keep their introductions brief. Stating the name and affiliation is sufficient. Panelist, it would be best if you saved interesting facts about yourself, such as your aversion to foods that start with the letter Q, for the tell-all autobiography.
4. Panelists, who are competitors in real life, tend to take jabs at each other, then pretend it was joke and say 'Oh, I'm just kidding...'. Don't do that. It's not funny.
5. Panelists, who are friends in real life, occasionally (and awkwardly) start picking on one of their own in the name of comedy. Don't do that. It's not funny.
6. It is certifiably lame to still be making Brangelina and/or Netbeans girls jokes and references.
7. The moderator is the only guy on stage who is allowed to be funny -- but not too funny. People are not there to see a stand-up act.
8. The audience Q & A portion should be controlled tightly by the moderator. It only takes one persistent audience member to ask an off-topic question and before you know it, an RCP Best Practices panel turns into a 30-minute discussion of the SWT_AWT bridge on Mac.
9. The audience should lower their expectations. A 45-minute discussion will not result in closure on the open issues being discussed.
10. A 45-minute discussion may not result in closure, but it would be nice if it resulted in an action plan or a concensus on a direction going forward. Otherwise, we would be having the same conversation next year.

When Jupiter Aligns with Mars

For the past few days, I have been so filled with the joy of EclipseCon that I cannot contain it.

However, March seems like an inconvenient time to have the Eclipse event of the year --particularly for the Eclipse developers:

1. EclipseCon preparation time takes away from development time when we could be fixing bugs and adding new features. Add onto that the week of EclipseCon itself where development practically comes to a halt.
2. Teams try to cram as much new functionality as possible into M5 to showcase it at the conference. Quality of some of these features may be somewhat questionable, given that there was not enough time to test.

Wouldn't July, for example, be a better time to hold the conference? It would be right after the release of the Eclipse train; so it is a time when the developers are unwinding, and the quality/volume of new features is at its peak.

As for why EclipseCon is currently held in March every year, here is my conjecture:
"Given our apparent (and inexplicable ;-) fascination with Jupiter, March is probably the month when Jupiter aligns with Mars or something. So we must hold EclipseCon at that time. We must!"

OSGi - the miniseries

Over the past few days, Neil Bartlett has published three installments in his OSGi tutorial series:

1. Getting started with OSGi: Your first bundle
2. Getting started with OSGi: Interacting with the Framework
3. A Comparison of Eclipse extensions and OSGi services

With M5 behind us, I finally had time to read the miniseries. Here is my review:
"Bartlett's OSGi miniseries is the best miniseries since Alex Haley's Roots!"

I encourage every developer to make some time to read these articles. They are a great read and you will learn a lot. The third one in the series is my favourite so far.

By comparison, if you had spent three hours watching the Grammys on Sunday night, the only life lesson you would have learned is that "Hips don't lie" :)

Unfortunately, Neil's excellent series is hosted on EclipseZone, so you will most likely be greeted with a Netbeans ad at the top of the page when you go read it.

When will this madness stop? Is it hurting Eclipse? No. But it is certainly not helping either.

Eclipse on Mac

Today I read a blog post claiming that Eclipse has little, if any, following among Mac users.

That claim took me by surprise. So as a litmus test, I did a bugzilla query to see how many bugs were reported on Mac and I got 3550 bug reports. Not too bad.

Where is the data that backs up or refutes this claim?

It would be interesting if the webmaster could provide Mac download statistics and/or if the marketing wing of the Eclipse Foundation could provide one of them pie charts showing Eclipse's mind share on Mac.

No Thanks

One of the nice things about working in open source is that you interact directly with your customers (ie. the community) in an open forum via bug reports. When we, the committers, resolve a bug as fixed, it gives us a sense of joy that we made some user out there happy.

While implementing a highly-anticipated feature is a reward in itself, it would be nice to hear a thank-you every once in a while. Unfortunately, very rarely do we hear that thank you from users.

72 people have voted for a Text Drag and Drop feature. When it was finally implemented, not one thank you.

Oh well, such is life...

Thank you, Dani!

Foul!

Am I the only one who finds it wildly inappropriate for EclipseZone to be running Netbeans 5.5 ads?

New Year, New Forms

Je love Forms, je can't live without Forms, and we are starting off the new year with the long-anticipated Forms facelift for the Europa release.

Visual designer extraordinaire Kim Peter has just posted new screenshots showing the new vision. New enhancements and features include: color refinements, header/section title updates, one and two-row header variations, drag-and-drop to and from the header, error validations and much much more.

We are now very busy trying to implement that vision and get it ready for the masses by the end of the 3.3 M5 milestone.

Here is a taste of the new Forms on Vista:


I am certainly going to nominate Kim for Top Contributor for being a champion of cool and esthetically pleasing UIs for years.

Incidentally, if you want to learn more, there is an excellent Forms tutorial at EclipseCon 2007, where all aspects of Forms, old and new, will be covered.