On 06/04/12 13:09, Nuno Tavares wrote:
Platonides,
I think the application should be compiled on the most cross-platform binary format possible and, at the moment, that is Java.
Any other will imply unnecessary maintenance.
I don't think having a single binary is a big win. Users are already used to download different versions a for Windows/Linux/Mac, and we can easily guess their platform to suggest the most likely one.
Java is cool for web applets but it's hard to run in the desktop. We can't provide instructions like: Download the linked file to your desktop Go to Start menu -> run, type cmd.exe and type: cd Desktop C:\Program files\Java\jre3.14\bin\javaw.exe" -jar uploader.jar
We can't provide a batch file to run it either, as we don't know the path where java is installed, even assuming that it's there somewhere (which they may not have, adding more complexity to the instructions and download time). A business IT department can deploy a common jre to all the company computers and provide a good-looking shortcut which points to fixed paths to the jre and the jar, but we're targetting the masses here.
I also agree to derive the work from Commonist (I don't know it yet).
I took a look at it, but so fat I'm unimpressed. I couldn't compile the scala one, so I went with the java version. Then I had to disable my locale because otherwise it didn't even start. The account login doesn't work (probably because it uses an old way to login, but it's still annoying). And the interface doesn't give me cool feelings either. It's interesting as an inspiration, and I'm sure it works well for people which already prepared a folder with all the files to upload, but i don't think it'd appeal our photographers. It's also a bit confusing, for instance I don't know how are the two description fields used (are they concatenated? the specific replaces the general one?). However, I admit that good UIs are hard. It's possible I wouldn't be able to produce a better one :)
Those of you familiar with them, can you describe its strong points?
Best regards