Didn't anyone in IBM management notice that Java does not have good GUI support?
I don't think that's an issue. This is supposed to be a J2EE office suite. I've never seen it before, but I'd imagine that the GUI is created using web-based technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript. Not that that's any better though.:)
Although, for what it's worth, Java GUIs can actually be quite good if SWT is used.
I think mouse gestures are awesome features for a web browser. It might be a less awesome feature at the windowing system level, but it'll probably still be useful sometimes. The reason why mouse gestures are great for browsers is that a browser is a fundamentally mouse driven type of application.
I absolutely agree with jd142 about it being a pain to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse to do a gesture and icons being relatively large, but I think you're missing the point. Taking your hands off the keyboard shouldn't be a big issue because you hardly need the keyboard at all except when you type a URL or need to enter text in a form. The great thing about mouse gestures is that you pretty much never have to move your mouse more than a little in each direction. It's much faster than non-gesture browsing.
I'll give you an example. While browsing the front page of slashdot, I often find several stories that I find interesting and I'll open them in new tabs. This can be done quite easiliy with a gesture, using the CTRL + left mouse button, or a the middle mouse button. Once these tabs are open, I would normally have to move my mouse to the top of the screen to choose a tab and then probably move it back down later to click on a link in the text. If I have mouse gestures however, I can leave my pointer near the centre and do a mouse gesture to move to the next tab. I can also do a mouse gesture later to close the tab instead of moving the mouse. The same applies to moving forward or backward in a browser. Holding down a mouse button and doing a small quick left or right motion is much faster than moving your mouse up to the back and forward buttons or taking your hands off the mouse to do ALT + . If you have a mouse with a mouse wheel, you don't even have to move your mouse to scroll either. Although, I must admin that doing I think using large complex mouse gestures are probably slower and more prone to error than normal commands. Fortunatly, most mouse gestures in Mozilla involve two quick mouse motions instead of drawing intricate symbols.
So you see, it's not about taking your hands off the keyboard, but it's about gestures allowing you to use your mouse more quickly and allowing you to avoid taking your hand off your mouse.
This is fantastic for mouse driven applications, not too useful if you're typing text at a shell. Even still, I'm sure it will be useful for some applications.
I've been using Cloudmark's SpamNet for the past few months and it's been working quite well.
The smart thing that SpamNet does, is that it relies on its users to determine if something is spam or not. If some email lands in your inbox and a few hundred SpamNet members have proclaimed it spam, it most likely is, and it gets immediatly filtered out. This has the net effect of a few user's needing to filter out a few message ocassionally, while the vast majority of messages are filtered out for all users. Although SpamAssassin seems quite good, it's still based upon filtering rules and spammers are constantly tweaking their emails to try to get around them. Since people are still better at determining what's spam and what's not, I find that its accuracy is generally better.
SpamNet isn't perfect though, as far as I know, it only works with Outlook on Windows and doesn't have a Unix, Linux or Mac version. It also sometimes filters out valid bulk mailings, but overall, I would definitely recommend it.
Actually SWT has several really nice advantages.
I agree that Swing has improved a lot in the past few years, but Swing apps are still not native apps and users can certainly tell the difference. SWT applications are essentially native applications not only in appearance, but also in functionality. There will always be little keyboard shortcuts or imcompatibilities that Swing will miss that SWT programs inherently account for because they use the native implementations underneath. SWT apps are generally considered more responsive than Swing apps. As cross-platforms toolkits go, the one-to-one mapping design philosophy has also been embraced as a great idea from an architectural stand point. (see http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design -1/SWT-Design-1.html for reasons why)
The SWT is not available for only Windows and Linux. It also works on Motif (for Unixes), Carbon (Mac) and I think they even have one for and embedded platform named QNX.
Also, IBM had no intentions of creating an "IBM-centric Java community" with the development of SWT. SWT was originally created to be used in Eclipse and the simple reason why they didn't use Swing was because Swing was horribly slow and ugly back then. I would say that it still is fairly slow and ugly, but one might argue that if Swing was in its current state when the Eclipse project was started that IBM may not have bothered to create the SWT.
True, not a very big account, but I think the folks in Redmond will be concerned with the kind of precedent this sets. Open source supporters in other governments can now point to Venezuela as a country that is moving government systems to open source. It has the potential to affect countries that could have very big accounts like China.
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Didn't anyone in IBM management notice that Java does not have good GUI support?
:)
I don't think that's an issue. This is supposed to be a J2EE office suite. I've never seen it before, but I'd imagine that the GUI is created using web-based technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript. Not that that's any better though.
Although, for what it's worth, Java GUIs can actually be quite good if SWT is used.
I use gestures in Mozilla.
I think mouse gestures are awesome features for a web browser. It might be a less awesome feature at the windowing system level, but it'll probably still be useful sometimes. The reason why mouse gestures are great for browsers is that a browser is a fundamentally mouse driven type of application.
I absolutely agree with jd142 about it being a pain to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse to do a gesture and icons being relatively large, but I think you're missing the point. Taking your hands off the keyboard shouldn't be a big issue because you hardly need the keyboard at all except when you type a URL or need to enter text in a form. The great thing about mouse gestures is that you pretty much never have to move your mouse more than a little in each direction. It's much faster than non-gesture browsing.
I'll give you an example. While browsing the front page of slashdot, I often find several stories that I find interesting and I'll open them in new tabs. This can be done quite easiliy with a gesture, using the CTRL + left mouse button, or a the middle mouse button. Once these tabs are open, I would normally have to move my mouse to the top of the screen to choose a tab and then probably move it back down later to click on a link in the text. If I have mouse gestures however, I can leave my pointer near the centre and do a mouse gesture to move to the next tab. I can also do a mouse gesture later to close the tab instead of moving the mouse. The same applies to moving forward or backward in a browser. Holding down a mouse button and doing a small quick left or right motion is much faster than moving your mouse up to the back and forward buttons or taking your hands off the mouse to do ALT + . If you have a mouse with a mouse wheel, you don't even have to move your mouse to scroll either. Although, I must admin that doing I think using large complex mouse gestures are probably slower and more prone to error than normal commands. Fortunatly, most mouse gestures in Mozilla involve two quick mouse motions instead of drawing intricate symbols.
So you see, it's not about taking your hands off the keyboard, but it's about gestures allowing you to use your mouse more quickly and allowing you to avoid taking your hand off your mouse.
This is fantastic for mouse driven applications, not too useful if you're typing text at a shell. Even still, I'm sure it will be useful for some applications.
I've been using Cloudmark's SpamNet for the past few months and it's been working quite well.
The smart thing that SpamNet does, is that it relies on its users to determine if something is spam or not. If some email lands in your inbox and a few hundred SpamNet members have proclaimed it spam, it most likely is, and it gets immediatly filtered out. This has the net effect of a few user's needing to filter out a few message ocassionally, while the vast majority of messages are filtered out for all users. Although SpamAssassin seems quite good, it's still based upon filtering rules and spammers are constantly tweaking their emails to try to get around them. Since people are still better at determining what's spam and what's not, I find that its accuracy is generally better.
SpamNet isn't perfect though, as far as I know, it only works with Outlook on Windows and doesn't have a Unix, Linux or Mac version. It also sometimes filters out valid bulk mailings, but overall, I would definitely recommend it.
Actually SWT has several really nice advantages. I agree that Swing has improved a lot in the past few years, but Swing apps are still not native apps and users can certainly tell the difference. SWT applications are essentially native applications not only in appearance, but also in functionality. There will always be little keyboard shortcuts or imcompatibilities that Swing will miss that SWT programs inherently account for because they use the native implementations underneath. SWT apps are generally considered more responsive than Swing apps. As cross-platforms toolkits go, the one-to-one mapping design philosophy has also been embraced as a great idea from an architectural stand point. (see http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design -1/SWT-Design-1.html for reasons why)
The SWT is not available for only Windows and Linux. It also works on Motif (for Unixes), Carbon (Mac) and I think they even have one for and embedded platform named QNX.
Also, IBM had no intentions of creating an "IBM-centric Java community" with the development of SWT. SWT was originally created to be used in Eclipse and the simple reason why they didn't use Swing was because Swing was horribly slow and ugly back then. I would say that it still is fairly slow and ugly, but one might argue that if Swing was in its current state when the Eclipse project was started that IBM may not have bothered to create the SWT.
True, not a very big account, but I think the folks in Redmond will be concerned with the kind of precedent this sets. Open source supporters in other governments can now point to Venezuela as a country that is moving government systems to open source. It has the potential to affect countries that could have very big accounts like China.