Symphonious

At some point Eclipse seems to have decided that I shouldn't be doing J2EE development and randomly turned off some of it's J2EE related features like being able to Run as server or create a new Webapp project. I suspect a software update went bad and it's screwed over it's configuration.

Sadly, with the massive number of plugins and crap that makes up an Eclipse install it's nearly impossible to sort out if one particular plugin got corrupted, if it's a configuration setting some that got corrupted or if the whole thing is foobar.  The log file for the workspace is particularly unhelpful just reporting that classes are missing - that's great, where were you expecting to find them though? Which plugin provides that particular class and which plugin is requesting that particular class? Then on a subsequent run it just reports that the plugin is already loaded so it doesn't need to load again - sadly, the plugin isn't loaded and none of the functionality it provides is available.

So I'm downloading the web tools all in one package and hopefully that will work.  Then I've just got to add in the other plugins I use again and hope it still works.

In the mean time, maybe I'll check out IDEA again…

It's a little bit scary to look at the number of browsers I have in my dock and regularly use.  Mostly this comes about because of the need to test on all the different browsers but still. I have a similar range of browsers on my Windows box at work (it adds Mozilla and Opera to the mix but obviously takes out Camino, Safari and OmniWeb).

In case you don't recognize the icons, the browsers pictured from top to bottom are: Camino, Safari, Safari (built from CVS), Firefox, Deer Park (Alpha of Firefox 1.5, needs to be upgraded to the beta still, but last week was too hectic to be testing browser betas), OmniWeb and IE.

On my windows box at work I think I have Opera, IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 7, Netscape 4.8, MyIE 2 and Avant.

There's a lot of talk going around about Sparkle, Microsoft's new UI design tool set, but I've been scared that this is the end of good user interface design since the second paragraph I read about it:

It's the rise of the graphic designer!

(from Scoble's blog)

At which point in time did we start letting graphic designers design user interfaces?  What happened to all the user interface designers?  You know, the ones that think about how to make software intuitive and user friendly, efficient and productive as opposed to flashy and cool looking.

You want to see how this ends, what software is going to wind up looking like in the future with graphic designers in charge? Look at the web.  Particularly, look at all those flash sites (no sparkle is not a flash killer, but flash gives designers the power to misbehave much more than HTML does). Have our standards for user interface design become so bad that all we care about is it looking pretty? Do we not care about productivity for users anymore?

Lets put graphic designers back where they belong - in the marketing department - and develop some tools that bring about the rise of the user interface designer.  We'll bring the graphic designers in as consultants to engineering to design logos and icons as required, under the direction of the usability engineers.