OK, here are a few Java rich-client based apps that I've heard of through non-developer channels:
- Minecraft: All my gamer friends, most of whom are not into software development at all, are raving about this. I was shocked to see that it was actually made in Java. It is 3D as well. Very low-fi 3D, but still 3D. Beyond Micecraft there a few other good Java games (Revenge of the Titans) and some emulators written in Java. - Interactive Animated Data Visualizations. I was reading one of my favorite business + economics web sites last month and they linked some really cool interactive data visualizations, that were implmented in Java (I can't find the link). HTML is standard for basic charts with very limited animation + interactivity. Flash is the most popular for more rich content, but Java is the third most common runtime for this. - Baby Names. The second link on Google for "baby names" (no quotes) is NameVoyager which is a really neat name data visualization implemented in Java. - Maple, the mathematics software toolkit. Largely done in rich client Java. - Interactive academic applets. For the college classes that I've taken recently, many of them feature interactive applets that demonstrate some concept. Two technical showpieces - ThinkFree Office Suite: Obviously, this never achieved success, but technically it's very impressive. If, hypothetically, this was a free application, and they removed the ads and intentional restricions on saving to their servers rather than to local disks, this would be a better rich client office suite than OpenOffice or, for my purposes, Microsoft Office. Then again, I have already switched to Google Docs as my primary office authoring suite. - MoneyDance: I replaced Quicken with this in the past. I've since moved on to web-client, cloud-hosted mint.com, which makes much more sense than a rich client, but back before mint.com, MoneyDance was an excellent commercial desktop app. Worked great on Linux and Windows. The interace was definitely nicer than Quicken ever was. You already dismissed it, but IDEs are a shining example. I have met serveral completely non-Java PHP, Python, and Ruby developers using either Eclipse, NetBeans, or IntelliJ. Those tools are widely regarded as expertly designed products with very complex user interfaces. On Sep 13, 2:49 pm, Casper Bang <casper.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > That is not my experiences, you generally can NOT just expect a Swing > app to look and feel correct all over. I have written a fair amount of > Swing and it's more complex and slower performing than native > bindings. You'll find the menu bar wrong placed on Mac, widget > background discolored on Linux, EDT paint issues etc. So this is > actually about the only point I agree with Steve Jobs on; native > widget toolkit is the only way to go if you want to make your users > happy. Of course, writing software from the ground up on a native GUI SDK produces better results than using a higher-level cross platform abstraction or a port from a different GUI SDK. That's generally known and not debated. But that doesn't mean native GUI SDKs are "the only way to go". There's a trade off: finer points of quality and performance and integration vs. cross platform support. So, if you agree with Steve Jobs on this, why are you so evangelical about MonoTouch, when that obviously adds a layer of abstraction between the application and the underlying native SDKs? Even the fanatical .NET + C# developers that I personally know who are doing iOS hobby projects have begrudgingly used Objective-C and showed little interest in MonoTouch, precisely because they want to avoid an added layer of API and complexity to support. > Yet look at how well they are doing; invading Linux, Android, iPhone/ > iPad etc. I still say you will be hard pressed finding popular Java > desktop applications beyond the developer crowd but I guess we'll just > have to agree to disagree. So, you suggest that desktop Java isn't doing well, but Mono is? May I ask for your list of runaway successful or technical impressive apps written in Mono? I see the stuff on the Wikpedia page like F-Spot, Tomboy, and Unity, and of course Mono dev tools like MonoDevelop, MonoTouch, and MonoDroid... Is that it? That's not very impressive. I thought, the purpose of Mono, was to spread and evangelize Microsoft technologies and build Microsoft developer mindshare, by "invading Linux, Android, iPhone/iPad", as you put it. At that, I guess they are successful... May I ask, have you done much Mono development yourself, or is this all from stuff you've read from Microsoft evangelist channels? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
