Success stories like MineCraft keep popping up from time to time. Behind the scenes it’s built with Java. As of today MineCraft has ~24 million registered users, of which ~5 million have bought the game. Most of them with a price of €19.95 (but they did start with a huge discount). In the last 24 hours, 60K people registered, and 8K people bought the game. (Source: http://www.minecraft.net/stats).

We keep hearing that desktop apps are hard to install and maintain. I don’t think Java is a cumbersome environment if 12-16 year boys and girls manage to get tens of thousands MineCraft servers running at their homes. Millions of regular Minecraft players run Java apps without an issue. There are thousands of plugins and mods written in Java for MineCraft server and client. Java is great for that but it’s way too easy to bash the platform if the real problem is usually in the product and distribution!

Let me share with you some of the user conversion stats in one of our own desktop apps, TimeGT. TimeGT is a task and life management app that is written in Java. It has an installer for Windows that includes Java runtime environment so user doesn’t have to install Java by herself. So far 99.1% of users who register their account at the website end up installing the app successfully and logging in with their username. That means essentially that every ~100th user has an issue with the desktop setup. For TimeGT case it’s very likely Mac issue as we don’t provide a .dmg file and running it in Mac is painful.

Eclipse IDE requires Java. OpenOffice requires Java. So does Adobe Photoshop. I believe it’s safe to say that you can still build great and massively popular stuff without falling into building on top of technology which was initially poured over with millions of dollars mostly to sell more ads, own more of your screen estate. Don’t get me wrong.
Of course web apps are perfectly natural for oh so many user cases. I’m still overly excited and thankful that web got a technological and distrubution kick at this scale. Oh. And building beautiful things is so much easier with the web instead of hacking with a Java Swing or SWT UI toolkit. Just know where the fine line is.

The road ahead with desktop and Java

I guess the challenges evolve around maintaining updates and supporting platforms (read: devices).

I’m not worried about the updates. It’s a feasible engineering task. In TimeGT we have automatically pushed updates (yes, requires restarting your app but so does Android and iPhone app!).

But getting your Java app to devices like Android and iPhone is not fun. I’m not sure how it all gets to a sensible place where you don’t have to over-abstract for the sake of single-sourcing yet avoiding idiotic rewriting of app in different languages.

Small footnote on desktop coding experience

While Eclipse remains to be the most popular IDEs around and provides a wonderful Java editor and extending capability, it scares me how its initial advantage of being fast and snappy is diminishing and people keep turning their heads toward vi/vim, SublimeText 2 and TextMate even for Java and Scala. You might think that a real IDE with full AST parsing and class model navigation is required for any reasonably sized projects but I keep seeing people hacking more and more with their text editors. I hope to see a change here. Get an IDE that is as fast for coding as vim.

Eclipse core itself is super fast and gets improved all the time but as with Chrome browser – plugins slow life down. There should be more control on seeing which plugins conserve most resources and a quick method to kill them, just as you close tabs in Chrome.

One project contains many different file types, they must blend into one hacking experience.

See TimeGT latest blog post for details. It is not a web-based tool (not yet, at least) but you can access your information anywhere with a pc and keep working even without internet connection!

Check it out and let me know what do you think!

This means Ericsson ongoing support for open source and more importantly Google-backed Android platform.

Ericsson will be offering Android-based phones mid-2009. Excellent news! I’m glad to see strong phone manufacturer joining the Alliance. As I understand, currently only Nokia and RIM (blackberrry) from the “big players list” are missing from the alliance.

To come up with some speculations — Ericsson might try to base new phone on X1/Experia that runs with Windows Mobile and first reviews claim it to have slow user interface.

Grab The PHP writing plugin for Eclipse from the update site and check it out if it works for you!

Sorry, but java6 and eclipse 3.3 only! (jsr-223 scripting engine starts from java 6)

Quercus GPL-licensed PHP Fragment is not mandatory – the plugin supports also javascript (and possibly all JSR223 scripting engines).

Have fun and let him know if you find some cool usage for it. Commenting at his blog is a good start.
I had to disable comments at my blog

A cool feature would be to write a small snippet that sends selected text to some rafb/etc pastebin and prints the url to the eclipse console view.

Procrastination is the new popular disease that threats everyone just like did stress years ago. Back then everyone admitted that stress is bad and people were trying hard to notice the stress in very early stages. Contrarily, Procrastination is taken as something to be proud of – like a habit of a genius.

John Perry at his website propagates Structured Procrastination to get over the unexisting productivity that you get from the Procrastination. The principle idea is to make something seemingly important your top priority task and just don’t do it – take next from the list. He claims it would cure the Procrastination and boost your effectiveness.

If you are hi-tech Procrastinator then you have probably also familiar with Paul Graham essay on Procrastination

I don’t believe any of this “tweak your lazyness” methodology that tells you Procrastination is something to be OK with. You don’t have to play with yourself and think out hacks to overcome Procrastination. You can do this but then you never get the effectiveness you are dreaming about.

You have to force your discipline, make effectiveness a habit! Start small, start planning your day.

Don’t start by making plans for a lifetime and next 2 years! If you don’t have the habit of acting small, how do you think you can make big actionable planning if you fail with one day planning? You need a plan for sure, but you have to fix the root first. As they say – think global, act local.

I’ll describe something that helped me to get out of this spiral when there was so much to do, so little time available and I still ended up by not doing anything.

Just take a paper and put down everything you want and could do tomorrow. If you are a real Procrastinator then you end up with a big list and everything seems feasible. At the end of the next day you probably notice that you managed to complete just a few tasks, or.. as a real Procrastinator.. you complete none.

Don’t worry, we know how to fix it! Take your list and calculate plan for tomorrow:

X = (y/a)*2+1
a - total number of tasks, y - number of completed tasks

Meaning, if you failed, just complete 1 task. If you finished 5 tasks out of 10, try to finish remaining 3 tasks tomorrow. Believe me, you’ll become extremely happy person after you manage the skill to complete at least 80% of your daily tasks for at least one month. After that it becomes natural habit and just keep practicing!

Let me know if any of this made sense to you!

Happy planning, work hard and take time to relax, dear Procrastinator

PS. Still, I think Paul Graham essay is excellent, he just tends to label everything as Procrastination and some of his examples are not signs of Procrastination!

PS. It finally makes sense why blogging is so popular in US – commuting takes a lot of time and train is the best place to blog.

How many engineers you need to find out your Nokia phone model number?

To find out that I own Nokia E61 I had to:

• Open the case
• Turn off the mobile phone to safely remove battery

And yeah, My Model Number is just right there – hidden under battery and unaccessible without powering it off.
Is it really that confidential? Not important anymore?

Isn’t the whole business of Nokia to ship same hardware with differently shaped models. Isn’t most of the marketing budget spent on visual branding connecting it with the worst of all times brand names like 5110, 6110, 7110, 7210, 7210i, 7232, 1232, 6539, 2252, 7174, 5343, 6465i, E51, E52, E61, N61, N72?
Now that I have powered off my phone… What was my PIN code?

Featuring our widget-guru Ivar at his new workspace

PS. Sorry if someone has commented here over last few weeks. Almost thousand spam comments is just way too much to moderate – feel free to call or snail-mail me.