Defection To Mono

[zingbat]

Its a new software concept. Valve describes it has a distributed file-system. So its natural that people gets a little confused and scared with it. But i think the idea is very good and from this news here it didn't made that bad:

http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000087029829

If Steam helps to take down all Vivendis, Interplays and Electronic Arts in the world then it will certainly be a good thing.
.

[swpalmer]

(*) - if MS owned Java, you can bet your ass there'd have been an entire marketing campaign getting world + dog to upgarde to java 5, AND they would have put 50 coders onto making a so-easy-to-use-every-tech-illiterate-CEO-can-manage-it upgrade of webstart, and making sure it:
- worked (in 95% of cases)
- was really, really user-focussed (even if it had some nasty user-unfriendliness that could have bene better - you can be sure there'd be none of this "if you don't make a shortcut NOW then this app will disappear. HAHAHAHAAHAH!")

Microsoft wouldn't need to do any of that... just like they didn't do any of that to educate *consumers* about the CLR and .Net
They have a huge monopoly.  They just have to include it in Windows or "Windows Update" and 90% of the world gets it.

As for user-focused... MS is extremely bad at that too.  Take a look at MS Word - packed full of useless features to most people, and simple things are difficult, like getting a table to look like you want, or anchoring a graphic and having the text around it do what you want.  Or there is Windows Explorer - the core file browser of their OS that has been totally broken for so many years.. with it's tree views that never refresh properly, showing deleted folders long after they are gone, and not showing new folders.  Where deleting a single empty directory might take tens of seconds.

MS deserves no respect in that regard.  They have what they have because of unfortunate consequences of IBMs marketing in the early 80's and maybe a couple good business decisions (and several illegal ones) after that... the quality of their product is certainly not the reason they enjoy the monopoly they have now.

[Mark Thornton]

export it in a format that lets you copy it to other machines and import it back again.

Couldn't you add this capability from within a WebStart application? To do it you need to be able to open the JNLP file and each of the resource jars (you can parse the JNLP file to find the names). Then copy the whole lot to where ever the user wants it. Provide a simple script to import it back into the webstart cache (not necessarily on the same machine).

Obviously this depends on the new import facility in J2SE5.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Mark Thornton]

It should inform users of upgrades but only download them when asked.

Divide your upgrades into two categories; minor ones (or security fixes) which everyone should have ASAP and the rest. For the non minor updates, use a new URL for the jnlp file. This allows people to continue using the old version. Include in the old versions a resource containing information on the new versions (and update this). In the extreme case you could limit updating of the old versions to just the new version information.

So you can manage your own policy of what is forced on the user and what is merely notified. No need to wait for a new version of WebStart to fix this defect.