Symphonious

Where is it? Clearly I'm missing something here. There's a wiki with some good getting started overview stuff and some other chicken scratching but I'm yet to find an actual reference telling me what's actually allowed in struts.xml. Shouldn't that be pointed to in a big neon sign? The struts.xml page on the wiki isn't exactly comprehensive and while the DTD is listed on the examples page it's not exactly commented..

Oh and did I mention that wiki's are a horrible way to write documentation?

We've been looking at ways to improve the experience for end users when applets first start up. It's unfortunate that the worst experience with applets is always the first one since that's when the JVM has to start up and the applet has to download. Once all that happens subsequent usage of applets tends to be lightning fast - particularly with the latest JVMs.

Sadly, that awful Java coffee cup graphic just doesn't make users happy while they wait for the applet to download. Equally sadly, there's no good option to get rid of it. You can specify an image of your own to load, but then it replaces the progress bar and it can't be dynamically resized to fit the applet. Heck you can't even center it. Worse yet, by the time the graphic downloads and displays the applet is just about ready so the user winds up seeing an empty box for a while then a brief flash of the image and then the applet's ready.

You can't overlay a DIV on top of the applet because most browsers will render the applet on top regardless and there's no way to show the applet's download progress from a DIV anyway.

The only vaguely plausible option is a light-weight bootstrap applet that displays while the real applet is loading, but that suffers from the same problems as the image in that it takes too long to download and be ready to display - you'd be better off just loading the applet. Plus it breaks LiveConnect functionality because all of a sudden the public methods on your applet are hidden behind the loader applet. You could delegate through but you'd have to do it via reflection or the class loader will demand the main applet be available before if will load your loader class.

Java 1.4 was a little better in that you could have the progress bar showing with your own custom image in the top left hand corner and you could customize the background color of the rest of the applet. Still ugly but at least workable. With Java 1.5 and above the option to display the progress bar is gone, the default animation is distracting and ugly and the Java 6 animation is going to become even worse with the next update.

Sigh…

I was quite interested in a few of the new features listed for WordPress 2.1, since they look like they could be quite useful to build into the plugin I have to use EditLive! as the editor for posts. In particular

• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins

sounds very interesting, since I've not gotten around to doing anything much with images and EditLive! has a lot of support for media that is currently going to waste. Sadly, browsing through the WordPress documentation lists nothing about how to actually go about using these wonderful new APIs. In fact, it doesn't mention them at all - it seems the documentation is still for the 2.0 release.

I'm sure there's someone out there that knows where to start looking for these things, and I'm sure I could work it out if I invested enough time, but why should I? Why should I waste my time helping to build plugins for WordPress if the developers, who are running a business based on the product, can't be bothered even writing down some brief details about what the new APIs allow, let alone how to use them.

I hate writing documentation as much as the next developer, but we need to start thinking about our users a little instead of just expecting them to waste their time working it out. In the end it means more users and happier users of our products and thus more money for the developers, whether it be directly via sales or indirectly via advertising, partnerships or whatever way the business' bills are paid.

Stupid wordpress still not supporting Atom 1.0. Stupid upgrade that overwrote my changes to make it support Atom 1.0. Yay for the cool plugin that will avoid this problem in the future. Also yay for the fact that it works out of the box with PHP 4 instead of using PHP 5 only functions for the date. Here's hoping it gets the time zones correct.

Whoever thought that supporting free mailing lists by putting ads in each email was ever going to be a good idea? My spam filter consistently picks up emails from Yahoo lists as spam and because the ads keep changing it never seems to learn that their not.

It probably doesn't help that Yahoo also includes a screenful of mailing list information at the end of each and every single post to the list.

Sigh.