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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

I looked at javax.sound yesterday and estimated it would take me 4-6 weeks, full-time, to do a production-quailty port using Core Audio. I’ll bid the project out at $20,000.

How about Kickstarter?

Desktop Java is a ruinously expensive legacy that they need to do something about.

All the angry screeds against Steve Jobs won’t change the fact that this is the “ball and chain” that’s pulling Java below the waves.

I think attempting to do cross-platform UIs held Smalltalk back as well. You either have Least Common Denominator native UIs that stink, or emulated UIs that don't look native. "Cross Platform" failed for the general public end-user. Web Apps took up their niche.

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Eclipse is cross-platform, comes with a disgusting component system (OSGi), pillages all your RAM, and yet is still arguably the most popular IDE these days.

Firefox is quite popular too, and uses its own custom cross-platform UI toolkit.

I've heard of in-house apps being done with XUL. I'm not aware of any used by the general public, other than Firefox.

To be a successful cross-platform development environment, there would have to be lots of these. To my knowledge, only web apps are that widespread and used by the general public, not primarily for in-house apps.

Does Songbird count? I think ActiveState's IDE's are XUL too, but it seesm devs are generally more willing to accept cross-platform apps.

Miro and the eMusic Downloader should count, too.

http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide

Firefox has never looked or felt like a native application on the Mac. It didn't even have native form controls or pixel-perfect scrolling ala Safari until fairly recently.

... and is slow, pillages your RAM, and for many folks is a de facto web IDE. :) Think Firebug, etc.

How many general-public end-user apps are built with SWT?

There don't seem to be many. But I believe it has been used quite extensively in internally-developed applications, never intended for the mass market. The same goes for Swing as well.

So although end consumers might not see them, it will certainly take a long time for SWT or Swing to die. These are the same class of applications that are keeping IE 6 alive, after all.

Does this matter to Apple? I doubt it's significant, as most of these applications are probably running on Windows desktops already. Probably more significant is the legion of Java developers that have been vocal proponents of Macs over recent years. The numbers of such developers might not be so great in an absolute sense, but the amount of noise they create is disproportionate. And, more importantly, they are more motivated to build interesting stuff for the platform they use.

Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony aren't consumer apps but they both have a pretty big user base beyond typical Eclipse users. Azureus is the first consumer app that comes to mind.

Azureus (Vuze) is one of the most popular bittorrent clients.

JDownloader bundles the SWT libraries, but I don't know how much of its UI is written in SWT.

L.C.D. UIs are a sign of a bad designer. Remember the Backblaze article on the frontpage from last week?

http://blog.backblaze.com/2008/12/15/10-rules-for-how-to-wri...

While the underlying logic should be the same, each UI should be leveraged towards whatever OS is running the app. It requires a bit of across-the-aisle thinking to create a decent UI for the other OS, but it's do-able.

UI design should be more like a cross-channel ad campaign (print, web and TV) than porting.

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