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  • Java Spotlight Episode 57: Live From #Devoxx - Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg of the London JUG with Yara Senger of SouJava

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet Live from Devoxx 11,  an interview with Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg from the London JUG along with  Yara Senger from the SouJava JUG on the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 248, and Adopt-a-JSR program. Both the London JUG and SouJava JUG are JCP Standard Edition Executive Committee Members. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manger in Oracle Developer Tools; Stephen Chin, Java Champion and Java FX expert; and Antonio Goncalves, Paris JUG leader. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Netbeans 7.1 JDK 7 upgrade tools Netbeans First Patch Program OpenJFX approved as an OpenJDK project Devoxx France April 18-20, 2012 Events Nov 22-25, OTN Developer Days in the Nordics Nov 22-23, Goto Conference, Prague Dec 6-8, Java One Brazil, Sao Paulo Feature interview Ben Evans has lived in "Interesting Times" in technology - he was the lead performance testing engineer for the Google IPO, worked on the initial UK trials of 3G networks with BT, built award-winning websites for some of Hollywood's biggest hits of the 90s, rearchitected and reimagined technology helping some of the most vulnerable people in the UK and has worked on everything from some of the UKs very first ecommerce sites, through to multi-billion dollar currency trading systems. He helps to run the London Java Community, and represents the JUG on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. His first book "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" (with Martijn Verburg) has just been published by Manning. Martijn Verburg (aka 'the Diabolical Developer') herds Cats in the Java/open source communities and is constantly humbled by the creative power to be found there. Currently he resides in London where he co-leads the London JUG (a JCP EC member), runs a couple of open source projects & drinks too much beer at his local pub. You can find him online moderating at the Javaranch or discussing (ranting?) subjects on the Prgorammers Stack Exchange site. Most recently he's become a regular speaker at conferences on Java, open source and software development and has recently wrapped up his first Manning title - "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" with his co-author Ben Evans. Yara Senger is the partner and director of teacher education and Globalcode, graduated from the University of Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos, has significant experience in Brazil and abroad in developing solutions to critical Java. She is the co-creator of Java programs Academy and Academy of Web Developer, accumulating over 1000 hours in the classroom teaching Java. She currently serves as the President of Sou Java. In this interview Ben, Martijn, and Yara talk about the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 348, and the Adopt-a-JSR program. Mail Bag What's Cool Show Transcripts Transcript for this show is available here when available.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 75: Greg Luck on JSR 107 Java Temporary Caching API

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet Recorded live at Jfokus 2012, an interview with Greg Luck on JSR 107 Java Temporary Caching API. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel is Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java EE Developer Advocate. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JavaOne 2012 call for papers is open (closes April 9th) LightFish, Adam Bien's lightweight telemetry application Java EE 6 sample code JavaFX 1.2 and 1.3 EOL Repeating Annotations in the Works Events March 26-29, EclipseCon, Reston, USA March 27, Virtual Developer Days - Java (Asia Pacific (English)),9:30 am to 2:00pm IST / 12:00pm to 4.30pm SGT  / 3.00pm - 7.30pm AEDT April 4-5, JavaOne Japan, Tokyo, Japan April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India Feature Interview Greg Luck founded Ehcache in 2003. He regularly speaks at conferences, writes and codes. He has also founded and maintains the JPam and Spnego open source projects, which are security focused. Prior to joining Terracotta in 2009, Greg was Chief Architect at Wotif.com where he provided technical leadership as the company went from a single product startup to a billion dollar public company with multiple product lines. Before that Greg was a consultant for ThoughtWorks with engagements in the US and Australia in the travel, health care, geospatial, banking and insurance industries. Before doing programming, Greg managed IT. He was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts. He is a Chartered Accountant, and spent 7 years with KPMG in small business and insolvency. Mail Bag What’s Cool RT @harkje: To update an earlier tweet: #JavaFX feels like Swing with added convenience methods, better looking widgets, nice effects and...

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 150: James Gosling on Java

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with James Gosling, father of Java and Java Champion, on the history of Java, his work at Liquid Robotics, Netbeans, the future of Java and what he sees as the next revolutionary trend in the computer industry. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes Feature Interview James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". He spent many years as a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs' for Unix systems. At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java, and a researcher at Sun labs where his primary interest was software development tools.     He then was the Chief Technology Officer of Sun's Developer Products Group and the CTO of Sun's Client Software Group. He briefly worked for Oracle after the acquisition of Sun. After a year off, he spent some time at Google and is now the chief software architect at Liquid Robotics where he spends his time writing software for the Waveglider, an autonomous ocean-going robot.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 139: Mark Heckler and José Pereda on JES based Energy Monitoring @MkHeck @JPeredaDnr

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Mark Heckler and José Pereda on using JavaSE Embedded with the Java Embedded Suite on a RaspberryPI along with a JavaFX client to monitor an energy production system and their JavaOne Tutorial- Java Embedded EXTREME MASHUPS: Building self-powering sensor nets for the IoT Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Java Virtual Developer Day Session Videos Available JavaFX Maven Plugin 2.0 Released JavaFX Scene Builder 1.1 build b28 FXForm 2 release 0.2.2 OpenJDK8/Zero cross compile build for Foundation model HSAIL-based GPU offload: the Quest for Java Performance Begins Progress on Moving to Gradle Java EE 7 Launch Keynote Replay Java EE 7 Technical Breakouts Replay Java EE 7 support in NetBeans 7.3.1 Java EE 7 support in Eclipse 4.3 Java Magazine - May/June Events Jul 16-19, Uberconf, Denver, USA Jul 22-24, JavaOne Shanghai, China Jul 29-31, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Sep 11-12, JavaZone, Oslo, Norway Sep 19-20, Strange Loop, St. Louis Sep 22-26 JavaOne San Francisco 2013, USA Feature Interview Mark Heckler is an Oracle Corporation Java/Middleware/Core Tech Engineer with development experience in numerous environments. He has worked for and with key players in the manufacturing, emerging markets, retail, medical, telecom, and financial industries to develop and deliver critical capabilities on time and on budget. Currently, he works primarily with large government customers using Java throughout the stack and across the enterprise. He also participates in open-source development at every opportunity, being a JFXtras project committer and developer of DialogFX, MonologFX, and various other projects. When Mark isn't working with Java, he enjoys writing about his experiences at the Java Jungle website (https://blogs.oracle.com/javajungle/) and on Twitter (@MkHeck). José Pereda is a Structural Engineer working in the School of Engineers in the University of Valladolid in Spain for more than 15 years, and his passion is related to applying programming to solve real problems. Being involved with Java since 1999, José shares his time between JavaFX and the Embedded world, developing commercial applications and open source projects (https://github.com/jperedadnr), and blogging (http://jperedadnr.blogspot.com.es/) or tweeting (@JPeredaDnr) of both. What’s Cool AquaFX 0.1 - Mac OS X skin for JavaFX by Claudine Zillmann DromblerFX adds a docking framework Part 2 of Gerrit’s taming the Nashorn for writing JavaFX apps in Javascript Tool from mihosoft called JSelect for quickly switching JDKs Apache Maven Javadoc Plugin 2.9.1 Released Proposal: Java Concurrency Stress tests (jcstress) Slide-free Code-driven session at SV JUG JavaOne approvals/rejects gone out

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 113: John Ceccarelli on Netbeans @JCeccarelli1

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with John Ceccarelli on Netbeans. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JCP Star Spec Leads 2012 Nominations open now until 31 December Java EE 7 Survey Results JavaFX for Tablets Survey JavaFX Scene Builder - Developer Preview Release Oracle JDK 7u10 released with new security features jtreg update, December 2012 Food For Tests: 7u12 Build b05, 8 b68 Preview Builds + Builds with Lambda & Type Annotation Support Developer Preview of Java SE 8 (with JavaFX) for ARM Project Nashorn: The Vote Is In Events Dec 20, 9:30am JCP Spec Lead Call December on Developing a TCK Jan 15-16, JCP EC Face to Face Meeting, West Coast USA Jan 14-17, IOUG, Redwood Shores Jan 29-31, Distributech,  San Diego Feb 2-3 FOSDEM, Brussels Feb 4-6 Jfokus, Sweden Feature Interview John Jullion-Ceccarelli is the head of engineering for the NetBeans open source project and for the VisualVM Java profiler. John started with Sun Microsystems in 2001 as a technical writer and has since held a variety of positions including technical publications manager, engineering manager, and NetBeans IDE 6.9 Release Boss. He recently relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area after 13 years living in Prague, the Czech Republic. What’s Cool Glassfish is 3 years old Arduino/Raspberry-Pi/JavaFX mash-up by Jose Pereda Early Access of Drombler FX for building modular JavaFX applications with OSGi and Maven Eclipse Modeling Framework Support coming for e(fx)clipse 8003562: Provide a command-line tool to find static dependencies Duke’s Choice Awards Winners LAD - includes JCP EC Member TOTVS London Java Community and SouJava jointly win JCP member of the year

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 77: Donald Smith on the OpenJDK and Java

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet An interview with Donald Smith about Java and OpenJDK. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Jersey 2.0 Milestone 2 available Oracle distribution of Eclipse (OEPE) now supports GlassFish 3.1.2 Oracle Linux 6 is now part of the certification matrix for 3.1.2 3rd part of Spring -> Java EE 6 article series published Joe Darcy - Repeating annotations in the works JEP 152: Crypto Operations with Network HSMs JEP 153: Launch JavaFX Applications OpenJDK bug database: Status update OpenJDK Governing Board 2012 Election: Results jtreg update March 2012 Take Two: Comparing JVMs on ARM/Linux The OpenJDK group at Oracle is growing App bundler project now open Events April 4-5, JavaOne Japan, Tokyo, Japan April 11, Cleveland JUG, Cleveland, OH April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 17-20, GIDS, Bangalore April 21, Java Summit, Chennai April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India May 5, Bangalore, Pune, ?? - JUG outreach May 7, OTN Developer Day, Mumbai May 8, OTN Developer Day, Delhi Feature InterviewDonald Smith, MBA, MSc, is Director of Product Management for Oracle. He brings worldwide enterprise software experience, ranging from small "dot-com" through Fortune 500 companies. Donald speaks regularly about Java, open source, community development, business models, business integration and software development politics at conferences and events worldwide including Java One, Oracle World, Sun Tech Days, Evans Developer Relations Conference, OOPSLA, JAOO, Server Side Symposium, Colorado Software Summit and others. Prior to returning to Oracle, Donald was Director of Ecosystem Development for the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit foundation supporting the Eclipse open source community. Mail Bag What’s Cool OpenJDK 7 port to Haiku JEP 154: Remove Serialization Goto for the Java Programming Language

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  • Tron: Legacy, 3D goggles, and embedded UA

    - by Roger Hart
    The 3D edition of Tron: Legacy opens with embedded user assistance. The film starts with an iconic white-on-black command-prompt message exhorting viewers to keep their 3D glasses on throughout. I can't quote it verbatim, and at the time of writing nor could anybody findable with 5 minutes of googling. But it was something like: "Although parts of the movie are 2D, it was shot in 3D, and glasses should be worn at all times. This is how it was intended to be viewed" Yeah - "intended". That part is verbatim. Wow. Now, I appreciate that even out of the small sub-set of readers who care a rat's ass for critical theory, few will be quite so gung-ho for the whole "death of the author" shtick as I tend to be. And yes, this is ergonomic rather than interpretive, but really - telling an audience how you expect them to watch a movie? That's up there with Big Steve's "you're holding it wrong" Even if it solves the problem, it's pretty arrogant. If anything, it's worse than RTFM. And if enough people are doing it wrong that you have to include the announcement, then maybe - just maybe - you've got a UX and/or design problem. Plus, current 3D glasses are like sitting in a darkened room, cosplaying the lovechild of Spider Jerusalem and Jarvis Cocker. Ok, so that observation was weirder than it was helpful; but seriously, nobody wants to wear the glasses if they don't have to. They ruin the visual experience of the non-3D sections, and personally, I find them pretty disruptive to the suspension of disbelief. This is an old, old, problem, and I'm carping on about it because Tron is enjoyable mass-market slush. It's easier for me to say "no, I can't just put some text on it. It's fundamentally broken, redesign it." in the middle of a small-ish, agile, software project than it would be for some beleaguered production assistant at the end of editing a $200 million movie. But lots of folks in software don't even get to do that. Way more people are going to see Tron, and be annoyed by this, than will ever read a technical communication blog. So hopefully, after two hours of being mildly annoyed, wanting to turn the brightness up, and slowly getting a headache, they'll realise something very, very important: you just can't document your way out of a shoddy UI.

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  • What was missing from the Content Strategy Forum?

    - by Roger Hart
    In April, Paris hosted the first ever Content Strategy Forum. The event's website proudly proclaims: 170 attendees, 18 nationalities, 17 speakers, 1 volcano... Content Strategy Forum 2010 rocked the world! The volcano was in Iceland, and the closest we came to rocking the world was a cursory mention in the Huffington Post, but I'll grant the event was awesome. One thing missing from that list, however, is "94 companies" (Plus a couple of universities and freelancers, and what have you). A glance through the attendees directory reveals a fairly wide organisational turnout - 24 students from two Parisian universities, countless design and marketing agencies, a series of tech firms, small and large. Two delegates from IBM, two from ARM, an appearance from RIM, Skype, and Facebook; twelve from the various bits of eBay. Oh, and, err, nobody from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Play, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, the BBC, no banks I noticed, and I didn't spot a newspaper. You get the idea. Facebook notwithstanding, you have to scroll through a few pages to Alexa rankings to find company names from the attendee list. I find this interesting, and I'm not wholly sure what to make of it. Of the large, web-centric, content-rich organizations conspicuously absent, at least one of two things is true: They didn't know about the event They didn't care about the event Maybe these guys all have content strategy completely sorted, and it's an utterly naturalised part of their business process. Maybe nobody at say, Apple or Play.com ever publishes a single piece of content that isn't neatly tailored to their (clearly defined, of course) user and business goals. Wouldn't that be lovely? The thing is, in that rosy and beatific world, there's still a case for those folks to join the community. There are bound to be other perspectives, and things to learn. You see, the other thing achingly conspicuous by its absence was case studies. In her keynote address, Kristina Halvorson made the point that what content strategy really needs is some big, loud success stories. A point I'd firmly second as a content strategist working within an organisation. Sarah Cancilla's presentation on content strategy at Facebook included some very neat, specific examples, and was richer for it. It didn't hurt that the example was Facebook - you're getting impressively big numbers off base. What about the other big boys? Is there anybody out there with a perspective? Do we all just look very silly to you, fretting away over text and images and users and purposes? Is content validation and maintenance so accustomed a part of your business that calling attention to it is like sniffing the air and saying "Hmm, a lot of nitrogen about today."? And if it is, do you have any wisdom to share?

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 105: Mark Reinhold on the Future of Java

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Our yearly interview with Mark Reinhold, Chief Java Architect, Java Platform Group on the future of Java. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Two Java Update Releases New Java SE 6 software updates from Apple for OS X 10.8, 10.7 and 10.6 are now live and available to all customers via the Mac App Store / Software Update. The JavaFX Community Site on Java.net JSR 360: Connected Limited Device Configuration 8 JSR 361: Java ME Embedded Profile 2012 JCP EC Election Ballot open Meet the EC Candidates Recording and Materials Events Oct 22-23, Freescale Technology Forum - Japan, Tokyo, Japan Oct 23-25, EclipseCon Europe, Ludwigsburg, Germany Oct 30-Nov 1, Arm TechCon, Santa Clara, United States of America Oct 31, JFall, Hart van Holland, Netherlands Nov 2-3, JMaghreb, Rabat, Morocco Nov 5-9, Øredev Developer Conference, Malmö, Sweden Nov 13-17, Devoxx, Antwerp, Belgium Nov 20-22, DOAG 2012, Nuremberg, Germany Dec 3-5, jDays, Göteborg, Sweden Dec 4-6, JavaOne Latin America, Sao Paolo, Brazil Feature InterviewMark Reinhold is Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, where he works on the Java Platform, Standard Edition, and OpenJDK. His past contributions to the platform include character-stream readers and writers, reference objects, shutdown hooks, the NIO high-performance I/O APIs, library generification, and service loaders. Mark was the lead engineer for the 1.2 and 5.0 releases and the specification lead for Java SE 6. He is currently leading the Jigsaw and JDK 7 Projects in the OpenJDK Community. Mark holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this interview he discusses the future of Java Platform with regards to Jigsaw, Lambda, and Nashorn components as well as the OpenJDK community. What’s Cool QotD: Ubuntu 12.10 Release Notes on OpenJDK 7 New Lambda binary drop Development forest for Compact Profiles (JEP 161)

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 58: Peter Korn and Ofir Leitner on ME Accessibility

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet Interview with Peter Korn and Ofir Leitner on Mobile and Embedded Accessibility. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java EE Developer Advocate. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Announcing Oracle WebLogic 12c Geronimo 3 beta - Another Apache project now compatible with Java EE 6 NetBeans 7.1 RC1 is out JavaFX links of the weeks JavaFX videos on Parleys: Nicolas Lorain's Introduction to JavaFX 2.0 from JavaOne 2011 & Richard Bair on JavaFX Architecture and Programming Model Events Dec 4, SOUJava Geek Bike Ride 2011, Sao Paulo  Dec 5-7, UKOUG, Birmingham, UK Dec 6-8, Java One Brazil, Sao Paulo Dec 9 UAIJUG, Uberlandia Dec 9 CEJUG, Fortaleza/CE Dec 10 GUJAVA, Florianopolis Dec 10 ALJUG, Maceio/AL Dec 11 Javaneiros, Campo Grande/MS Dec 12 GOJAVA, Goiania/GO Dec 13 RioJUG, Rio de Janeiro Feature interview Peter Korn is Oracle's Accessibility Principal – their senior individual contributor on accessibility. He is also Technical Manager of the AEGIS project, leading an EC-funded €12.6m investment building accessibility into future mainstream ICT (FP7-ICT224348). Mr. Korn co-developed and co-implemented the Java Accessibility API, and developed the Java Access Bridge for Windows. He helped design the open source GNOME Accessibility architecture found on most modern UNIX and GNU/Linux systems, and consulted on accessibility support for OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other applications. Prior to Sun/Oracle, Peter co-developed the outSPOKEN for Windows screen reader. Mr. Korn represented Sun/Oracle on TEITAC for the Section 508/255 refresh, co-led the OASIS ODF Accessibility subcommittee, and sits on INCITS V2 where he is contributing to ISO 13066: defining AT-IT interoperability standards including specifically the Java Accessibility API. Ofir Leitner is the architect of one of LWUIT's key features - the HTMLComponent which allows rendering HTML within LWUIT applications and to embed web-flows inside apps. Ofir is also responsible for LWUIT's bidirectional and RTL support and for the accessibility work that is being done these days in LWUIT. Mail Bag What's Cool Devoxx 2011 (Alexis) Eclipsecon Europe Talk by Andrew Overholt: IcedTea & IcedTea-Web Geek bike ride & Rio 500 Twitter followers @JavaSpotlight Show Transcripts Transcript for this show is available here when available.

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  • I made a 2D ENGINE for Android, looking for cooperation.

    - by Roger Travis
    My name is Robert, I am an Android programmer and wanted to show off my latest project - a 2d game engine. You can see it in action here - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=engineDemo.com My engine's main advantage is its ease of use. To have your level up and running, you'll need only 3 lines of code. ABoxView aboxView = new ABoxView(this); setContentView(aboxView); aboxView.loadLevel("level/level02"); Level are created in a special level constructor and object physical properties are stored in a corresponding XML file. I am looking to cooperate with those, who might be interesting in using my engine in their games. You can email me at [email protected] or post here. Thanks, Robert

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  • Google, typography, and cognitive fluency for persuasion

    - by Roger Hart
    Cognitive fluency is - roughly - how easy it is to think about something. Mere Exposure (or familiarity) effects are basically about reacting more favourably to things you see a lot. Which is part of why marketers in generic spaces like insipid mass-market lager will spend quite so much money on getting their logo daubed about the place; or that guy at the bus stop starts to look like a dating prospect after a month or two. Recent thinking suggests that exposure effects likely spin off cognitive fluency. We react favourably to things that are easier to think about. I had to give tech support to an older relative recently, and suggested they Google the problem. They were confused. They could not, apparently, Google the problem, because part of it was that their Google toolbar had mysteriously vanished. Once I'd finished trying not to laugh, I started thinking about typography. This is going somewhere, I promise. Google is a ubiquitous brand. Heck, it's a verb, and their recent, jaw-droppingly well constructed Paris advert is more or less about that ubiquity. It trades on Google's integration into any information-seeking behaviour. But, as my tech support encounter suggests, people settle into comfortable patterns of thinking about things. They build schemas, and altering them can take work. Maybe the ubiquity even works to cement that. Alongside their online effort, Google is running billboard campaigns to advertise Chrome, a free product in a crowded space. They are running these ads in some kind of kooky Calibri / Comic Sans hybrid. Now, at first it seems odd that one of the world's more ubiquitous brands needs to run a big print campaign in public places - surely they have all the fluency they need? Well, not so much. Chrome, after all, is not the same as their core product, so there's some basic awareness work to do, and maybe a whole new batch of exposure effect to try and grab. But why the typeface? It's heavily foregrounded, and the ads are extremely textual. Plus, don't we all know that jovial, off-beat fonts look unprofessional, or something? There's a whole bunch of people who want (often rightly) to ban Comic Sans I wonder, though. Are Google trying to subtly disrupt cognitive fluency? There's an interesting paper (pdf) about - among other things - the effects of typography on they way people answer survey questions. Participants given the slightly harder to read question gave more abstract answers. The paper references other work suggesting that generally speaking, less-fluent question framing elicits more considered answers. The Chrome ad typeface is less fluent for print. Reactions may therefore be more considered, abstract, and disruptive. Is that, in fact, what Google need? They have brand ubiquity, but they want here to change accustomed behaviour, to get people to think about changing their browser. Is this actually a very elegant piece of persuasive information design? If you think about their "what is a browser?" vox pop research video, there's certainly a perceptual barrier they're going to have to tackle somehow.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 138: Paul Perrone on Life Saving Embedded Java

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Paul Perrone, founder and CEO of Perrone Robotics, on using Java Embedded to test autonomous vehicle operations for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that will save lives. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JDK 8 is Feature Complete Java SE 7 Update 25 Released What should the JCP be doing? 2013 Duke's Choice Award Nominations Another Quick update to Code Signing Article on OTN Events June 24, Austin JUG, Austin, TX June 25, Virtual Developer Day - Java, EMEA, 10AM CEST Jul 16-19, Uberconf, Denver, USA Jul 22-24, JavaOne Shanghai, China Jul 29-31, JVM Summit Language, Santa Clara Sep 11-12, JavaZone, Oslo, Norway Sep 19-20, Strange Loop, St. Louis Sep 22-26 JavaOne San Francisco 2013, USA Feature Interview Paul J. Perrone is founder/CEO of Perrone Robotics. Paul architected the Java-based general-purpose robotics and automation software platform known as “MAX”. Paul has overseen MAX’s application to rapidly field self-driving robotic cars, unmanned air vehicles, factory and road-side automation applications, and a wide range of advanced robots and automaton applications. He fielded a self-driving autonomous robotic dune buggy in the historic 2005 Grand Challenge race across the Mojave desert and a self-driving autonomous car in the 2007 Urban Challenge through a city landscape. His work has been featured in numerous televised and print media including the Discovery Channel, a theatrical documentary, scientific journals, trade magazines, and international press. Since 2008, Paul has also been working as the chief software engineer, CTO, and roboticist automating rock star Neil Young’s LincVolt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental retro-fitted as a fully autonomous extended range electric vehicle. Paul has been an engineer, author of books and articles on Java, frequent speaker on Java, and entrepreneur in the robotics and software space for over 20 years. He is a member of the Java Champions program, recipient of three Duke Awards including a Gold Duke and Lifetime Achievement Award, has showcased Java-based robots at five JavaOne keynotes, and is a frequent JavaOne speaker and show floor participant. He holds a B.S.E.E. from Rutgers University and an M.S.E.E. from the University of Virginia. What’s Cool Shenandoah: A pauseless GC for OpenJDK

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  • A client wants us to screen work machines for pornography. Is it possible?

    - by Scant Roger
    A long-time client has asked us to help screen their work machines for pornography. They're worried about liability if sensitive materials were found. Their main concerns (for obvious reasons) are video, audio, and image files. If possible, they'd also like to scan text-based documents for inappropriate content. They have a hierarchy of not-for-work content starting with blatantly illegal (I don't have to list details), moving down to obviously offensive, and also including things that may be offensive to some - think lingerie ads, joke cards featuring butt cracks, and anything related to Howie Mandel. My questions are: Is this ethical? I think it is since every employee legally agrees that their work machine belongs to the company and is subject to search. The screenings are not to occur on personal machines brought to work. Is it feasible? I've done a lot of image processing/indexing but this seems like a whole new world of complexity. Any references to successful techniques for discovering porn? Is it appropriate for me to archive the results when something is discovered?

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 84: Anil Gaur on JavaEE 7

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet Interview with Anil Gaur, VP of Java Platform for Enterprise Edition and GlassFish Server, on JavaEE 7. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Tori Wieldt - Judges Selected for Duke's Choice Awards Donald Smith - #OpenJDK interview in Java Magazine Henrik Ståhl - Java 7 adoption at 23% JavaOne Kicks Off with Sunday Keynotes at Masonic Auditorium Jersey 2.0 M4 JSF 2.2 Latest Snapshot NetBeans IDE 7.2 - Deploy to Cloud Events May 30, OTN Java Developer Day, Redwood Shores June 11-14, Cloud Computing Expo, New York City June 12, Boulder JUG June 13, Denver JUG June 13, Eclipse Juno DemoCamp, Redwoood Shore June 13, JUG Münster June 14, Java Klassentreffen, Vienna, Austria June 18-20, QCon, New York City June 26-28, Jazoon, Zurich, Switzerland July 5, Java Forum, Stuttgart, Germany July 30-August 1, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Feature InterviewAnil Gaur is the Vice President of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and GlassFish Server at Oracle in the Fusion Middleware Group. Is responsible for creation of Java EE Specifications, Reference Implementation, and Compatibility Test Suites. Leading the evolution on Java EE into Cloud and PaaS environment through the Java EE 7 standard. Prior to that, managed the delivery of Java EE 6 Platform and SDK which quickly gained momentum in enterprise application development and deployments. In this episode we talk about GlassFish 3.1 release. Mail Bag What’s Cool RFR (L): Adding core file parsing on Mac OS X to SA Sergio Del Valle @swdelvalle is the 1,000 @JavaSpotlight twitter follower

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 86: Tony Printezis on Garbage Collection First

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Tony Printezis on Garbage Collection First (GC1). Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel is Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JSR 358: A major revison of the Java Community Process - JCP 3.Next JAX-RS 2.0 Early Draft- Third Edition Events June 11-14, Cloud Computing Expo, New York City June 12, Boulder JUG June 13, Denver JUG June 13, Eclipse Juno DemoCamp, Redwoood Shore June 13, JUG Münster June 14, Java Klassentreffen, Vienna, Austria June 18-20, QCon, New York City June 19, CJUG, Chicago June 20, 1871, Chicago June 26-28, Jazoon, Zurich, Switzerland Jun 27, Houston JUG ?? July 5, Java Forum, Stuttgart, Germany Jul 13-14, IndicThreads, Delhi July 30-August 1, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Feature InterviewTony Printezis is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle, based in Burlington, MA. He has been contributing to the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine since 2006. He spends most of his time working on dynamic memory management for the Java platform, concentrating on performance, scalability, responsiveness, parallelism, and visualization of garbage collectors. He obtained a Ph.D. in 2000 and a BSc (Hons) in 1995, both from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. In addition, he is a JavaOne Rock Star, a title awarded for his highly rated JavaOne session on GC. Mail Bag What’s Cool JavaOne content selection is complete. Notifications done.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 35: JVM Performance and Quality

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet Interview with Vladimir Ivanov, Ivan Krylov, Sergey Kuksenko on the JDK 7 Java Virtual Machine performance and quality. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador, and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java EE Developer Advocate. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Java 7 Launch Event GlassFish 3.1.1 re-planning done, first RC on July 7th, lots of component updates following customer and community feedback Mojarra 2.1.2 is here, just a little ahead of the GlassFish 3.1.1 release. In other JSF-related news, JSF 2.0 has a first expert draft New OpenJDK Project proposed: JDK 7 Update Events June 20-23 JAX, San Jose, CA June 21 Java + MySQL Webinar at 9:00 AM PDT June 21-23 JaZoon, Zurich, Switzerland June 22nd and 28th GlassFish Webinars (one in Portuguese) June 29-July 2 12th Forum Internatioal Software Livre, Porto Alegre, Brazil July 3, Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Brazil July 5, Brasilia, Brazil (DFJUG) July 6, Goiania, Brazil (GOJava) July 6-10 The Developers Conference, Sao Paulo, Brazil July 7 Java 7 Launch Event live in Redwood Shores, CA; Sao Paulo, BR; London, England. July 9, Joao Pessoa, Brazil (PBJUG) July 11, Natal, Brazil (JavaRN) July 14, Fortaleza, Brazil (CEJUG) July 16, Salvador, Brazil (JavaBahia) July 19, Toledo, Brazil (UNIPAR) July 21, Maringa, Brazil (RedFoot) Feature interview This weeks feature interview is with Vladimir Ivanov, HotSpot JVM Quality Engingeer;  Ivan Krylov, Licensee Engineering;  and Sergey Kuksenko, Java SE Performance Team on the JDK 7 Java Virtual Machine peformance and quality. What's Cool Ongoing OpenJDK Bylaws ratification results Show Transcripts Transcript for this show is available here when available

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  • Ad-hoc taxonomy: owning the chess set doesn't mean you decide how the little horsey moves

    - by Roger Hart
    There was one of those little laugh-or-cry moments recently when I heard an anecdote about content strategy failings at a major online retailer. The story goes a bit like this: successful company in a highly commoditized marketplace succeeds on price and largely ignores its content team. Being relatively entrepreneurial, the founders are still knocking around, and occasionally like to "take an interest". One day, they decree that clothing sold on the site can no longer be described as "unisex", because this sounds old fashioned. Sad now. Let me just reiterate for the folks at the back: large retailer, commoditized market place, differentiating on price. That's inherently unstable. Sooner or later, they're going to need one or both of competitive differentiation and significant optimization. I can't speak for the latter, since I'm hypothesizing off a raft of rumour, but one of the simpler paths to the former is to become - or rather acknowledge that they are - a content business. Regardless, they need highly-searchable terminology. Even in the face of tooth and claw resistance to noticing the fundamental position content occupies in driving sales (and SEO) on the web, there's a clear information problem here. Dilettante taxonomy is a disaster. Ok, so this is a small example, but that kind of makes it a good one. Unisex probably is the best way of describing clothing designed to suit either men or women interchangeably. It certainly takes less time to type (and read). It's established terminology, and as a single word, it's significantly better for web readability than a phrasal workaround. Something like "fits men or women" is short, by could fall foul of clause-level discard in web scanning. It's not an adjective, so for intuitive reading it's never going to be near the start of a title or description. It would also clutter up search results, and impose cognitive load in list scanning. Sorry kids, it's just worse. Even if "unisex" were an archaism (which it isn't), the only thing that would weigh against its being more usable and concise terminology would be evidence that this archaism were hurting conversions. Good luck with that. We once - briefly - called one of our products a "Can of worms". It was a bundle in a bug-tracking suite, and we thought it sounded terribly cool. Guess how well that sold. We have information and content professionals for a reason: to make sure that whatever we put in front of users is optimised to meet user and business goals. If that thinking doesn't inform style guides, taxonomy, messaging, title structure, and so forth, you might as well be finger painting.

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  • Oracle Text query parser

    - by Roger Ford
    Oracle Text provides a rich query syntax which enables powerful text searches.However, this syntax isn't intended for use by inexperienced end-users.  If you provide a simple search box in your application, you probably want users to be able to type "Google-like" searches into the box, and have your application convert that into something that Oracle Text understands.For example if your user types "windows nt networking" then you probably want to convert this into something like"windows ACCUM nt ACCUM networking".  But beware - "NT" is a reserved word, and needs to be escaped.  So let's escape all words:"{windows} ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  That's fine - until you start introducing wild cards. Then you must escape only non-wildcarded searches:"win% ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  There are quite a few other "gotchas" that you might encounter along the way.Then there's the issue of scoring.  Given a query for "oracle text query syntax", it would be nice if we could score a full phrase match higher than a hit where all four words are present but not in a phrase.  And then perhaps lower than that would be a document where three of the four terms are present.  Progressive relaxation helps you with this, but you need to code the "progression" yourself in most cases.To help with this, I've developed a query parser which will take queries in Google-like syntax, and convert them into Oracle Text queries. It's designed to be as flexible as possible, and will generate either simple queries or progressive relaxation queries. The input string will typically just be a string of words, such as "oracle text query syntax" but the grammar does allow for more complex expressions:  word : score will be improved if word exists  +word : word must exist  -word : word CANNOT exist  "phrase words" : words treated as phrase (may be preceded by + or -)  field:(expression) : find expression (which allows +,- and phrase as above) within "field". So for example if I searched for   +"oracle text" query +syntax -ctxcatThen the results would have to contain the phrase "oracle text" and the word syntax. Any documents mentioning ctxcat would be excluded from the results. All the instructions are in the top of the file (see "Downloads" at the bottom of this blog entry).  Please download the file, read the instructions, then try it out by running "parser.pls" in either SQL*Plus or SQL Developer.I am also uploading a test file "test.sql". You can run this and/or modify it to run your own tests or run against your own text index. test.sql is designed to be run from SQL*Plus and may not produce useful output in SQL Developer (or it may, I haven't tried it).I'm putting the code up here for testing and comments. I don't consider it "production ready" at this point, but would welcome feedback.  I'm particularly interested in comments such as "The instructions are unclear - I couldn't figure out how to do XXX" "It didn't work in my environment" (please provide as many details as possible) "We can't use it in our application" (why not?) "It needs to support XXX feature" "It produced an invalid query output when I fed in XXXX" Downloads: parser.pls test.sql

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 103: 2012 Duke Choice Award Winners

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Our annual interview with the 2012 Duke Choice Award Winners recorded live at the JavaOne 2012. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes Events Oct 13, Devoxx 4 Kids Nederlands Oct 15-17, JAX London Oct 20, Devoxx 4 Kids Français Oct 22-23, Freescale Technology Forum - Japan, Tokyo Oct 30-Nov 1, Arm TechCon, Santa Clara Oct 31, JFall, Netherlands Nov 2-3, JMagreb, Morocco Nov 13-17, Devoxx, Belgium Feature Interview Duke Choice Award Winners 2012 - Show Presentation London Java CommunityThe second user group receiving a Duke’s Choice Award this year, the London Java Community (LJC) and its users have been active in the OpenJDK, the Java Community Process (JCP) and other efforts within the global Java community. Student Nokia Developer GroupThis year’s student winner, Ram Kashyap, is the founder and president of the Nokia Student Network, and was profiled in the “The New Java Developers” feature in the March/April 2012 issue of Java Magazine. Since then, Ram has maintained a hectic pace, graduating from the People’s Education Society Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India, while working on a Java mobile startup and training students on Java ME. Jelastic, Inc.Moving existing Java applications to the cloud can be a daunting task, but startup Jelastic, Inc. offers the first all-Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables existing Java applications to be deployed in the cloud without code changes or lock-in. NATOThe first-ever Community Choice Award goes to the MASE Integrated Console Environment (MICE) in use at NATO. Built in Java on the NetBeans platform, MICE provides a high-performance visualization environment for conducting air defense and battle-space operations. DuchessRather than focus on a specific geographic area like most Java User Groups (JUGs), Duchess fosters the participation of women in the Java community worldwide. The group has more than 500 members in 60 countries, and provides a platform through which women can connect with each other and get involved in all aspects of the Java community. AgroSense ProjectImproving farming methods to feed a hungry world is the goal of AgroSense, an open source farm information management system built in Java and the NetBeans platform. AgroSense enables farmers, agribusinesses, suppliers and others to develop modular applications that will easily exchange information through a common underlying NetBeans framework. Apache Software Foundation Hadoop ProjectThe Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop project, written in Java, provides a framework for distributed processing of big data sets across clusters of computers, ranging from a few servers to thousands of machines. This harnessing of large data pools allows organizations to better understand and improve their business. Parleys.comE-learning specialist Parleys.com, based in Brussels, Belgium, uses Java technologies to bring online classes and full IT conferences to desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. Parleys.com has hosted more than 1,700 conferences—including Devoxx and JavaOne—for more than 800,000 unique visitors. Winners not presenting at JavaOne 2012 Duke Choice Awards BOF Liquid RoboticsRobotics – Liquid Robotics is an ocean data services provider whose Wave Glider technology collects information from the world’s oceans for application in government, science and commercial applications. The organization features the “father of Java” James Gosling as its chief software architect.United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesThe United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is on the front lines of crises around the world, from civil wars to natural disasters. To help facilitate its mission of humanitarian relief, the UNHCR has developed a light-client Java application on the NetBeans platform. The Level One registration tool enables the UNHCR to collect information on the number of refugees and their water, food, housing, health, and other needs in the field, and combines that with geocoding information from various sources. This enables the UNHCR to deliver the appropriate kind and amount of assistance where it is needed.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 149: Geertjan Wielenga on NetBeans 7.4 @netbeans @geertjanw

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Geertjan Wielenga on the NetBeans 7.4 release Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Everything in JavaFX is open sourced - Media is now opensource openjdk email Java SE 7 Update 45 Released 7u45 Caller-Allowable-Codebase and Trusted-Library Updated Security Baseline (7u45) impacts Java 7u40 and before with High Security settings What to do if your applet is blocked or warns of “mixed code”? LiveConnect changes in 7u45 JDK 8 end-game details and proposal for making a few exceptions Events Oct 28-30, JAX London, London Nov 4-8, Oredev, Malmö, Sweden Nov 6, JFall, Amsterdam, Netherlands Nov 11-15, Devoxx, Belgium Feature Interview Geertjan Wielenga is a principal product manager in Oracle for NetBeans and has been a member of the NetBeans Team for the past 7 years. NetBeans twitter: https://twitter.com/netbeans Geertjan’s twitter: https://twitter.com/geertjanw The Top Ten Coolest Features in NetBeans IDE 7.4 What’s Cool Nighthacking with James Gosling Arun Gupta waves goodbye and says hello JavaOne 2013 Roundup: Java 8 is Revolutionary, Java is back Survey on Java erasure/reification

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  • Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

    - by Roger Hart
    Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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  • Supporting users if they're not on your site

    - by Roger Hart
    Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 107: Adam Bien on JavaEE Patterns and Futures @AdamBien

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Adam Bien, Java Champion and Ace Director, on his book Real World Java EE Patterns-Rethinking Best Practices and Java EE futures. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News NightHacking Tour Continues - Don't Miss It! JavaFX Ensemble in the Mac App Store12 Announcing the JavaFX UI controls sandbox Java EE 7 Status Update - November 2012 2012 Executive Committee (EC) Elections Events Nov 5-9, Øredev Developer Conference, Malmö, Sweden Nov 13-17, Devoxx, Antwerp, Belgium Nov 20-22, DOAG 2012, Nuremberg, Germany Dec 3-5, jDays, Göteborg, Sweden Dec 4-6, JavaOne Latin America, Sao Paolo, Brazil Dec 14-15, IndicThreads, Pune, India Feature InterviewAdam Bien is a Java Champion, NetBeans Dream Team Founding Member, Oracle ACE Director, Java Developer of the Year 2010. He has worked with Java since JDK 1.0, with Servlets/EJB since 1.0. He participates in the JCP as an Expert Group member for the Java EE 6 and 7, EJB 3.X, JAX-RS, CDI, and JPA 2.X JSRs. The author of several books about JavaFX, J2EE, and Java EE, including Real World Java EE Patterns—Rethinking Best Practices and Real World Java EE Night Hacks—Dissecting the Business Tier.The Kindle version of Real World Java EE Patterns-Rethinking Best Practices was released October 31. It’s only $9.99, but if you are an Amazon Prime members you can “borrow” the book for free. What’s Cool Building OpenJFX 2.2 Again

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  • Making a full-screen animation on Android? Should I use OPENGL?

    - by Roger Travis
    Say I need to make several full-screen animation that would consist of about 500+ frames each, similar to the TalkingTom app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.outfit7.talkingtom2free ). Animation should be playing at a reasonable speed - supposedly not less, then 20fps - and pictures should be of a reasonable quality, not overly compressed. What method do you think should I use? So far I tried: storing each frame as a compressed JPEG before animation starts, loading each frame into a byteArray as the animation plays, decode corresponding byteArray into a bitmap and draw it on a surface view. Problem - speed is too low, usually about 5-10 FPS. I have thought of two other options. turning all animations into one movie file... but I guess there might be problems with starting, pausing and seeking to the exactly right frame... what do you think? another option I thought about was using OPENGL ( while I never worked with it before ), to play animation frame by frame. What do you think, would opengl be able to handle it? Thanks!

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