Mark McLaren's Blog

A common question asked by software developers is: Should we ask users for an email before they can try our software? Asking for an email would be useful for marketing purposes, but would be a turn-off for some users and discourage them from trying it.

This is exactly the question we asked a few months ago – to answer it we set up an A/B test. Half the visitors to our download page were asked for their name and email address, half weren’t.
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I love class diagrams. When I’m knee-deep in spaghetti code there’s nothing better to help me understand what’s going on. I’ve even developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder which requires me to have a pen and paper handy at all times ‘just in case’ I need to jot down a little class diagram.

But recently I came across a bit of code that was resistant to the power of the class diagram. What if there are no significant class relationships, just a bunch of static methods?
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Well after 3 years development we’ve finally released Solar Accounts:

www.SolarAccounts.co.uk

Think you know Eclipse? Most programmers quickly learn the common keystrokes but don’t take advantage of other good shortcuts. Here are my favourite lesser-known ones:
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Would you rather have a team of three excellent programmers or 15 with average ability? Most programmers would want the team of three, but most managers I suspect would pick the larger team. There’s plenty of support for the idea that the excellent-to-average productivity ratio is at least five, but you occasionally hear, “Well, I could believe two or three times as productive, but five or ten…?”
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Three years ago we chose SWT for our accounting software partly because Swing was painfully bad at rendering text. Since then Swing has come a long way, though it’s still not as good as Microsoft or Apple.

See for yourself; below are examples of different fonts rendered on different platforms.
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For years Swing has been missing some very obvious components. Java developers have been crying out for common controls such as a Date Picker, Wizard Dialog and Progress Dialog.

Sure, there are dozens of third-party libraries, but these are generally third-rate solutions. I don’t want to use something a kid put together for his college assignment, and I don’t want to pay fifty bucks for a simple date text field. There needs to be one, official, standard implementation for each common control. Microsoft understands this. So does Eclipse. Why can’t Sun?

Having said this, here is my attempt at a couple of these dialogs:
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Benchmarks are tedious to run. You have to compile the code, execute the tests, record the results, create charts and tables. Then the benchmark becomes out of date as soon as a new compiler, JRE or CPU is released.

So I’ve created JavaSpeed, an Eclipse plugin to run a small set of performance tests based on this benchmark. The screenshots are self-explanatory:

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Like literally a million other people, I’ve decided to set up my blog. I’m not aiming for a Pulitzer prize, just something above the usual What-My-Cat-Ate-For-Breakfast drivel. I believe Steve Martin said it best in Planes, Trains and Automobiles:

“And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea – have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”

For the curious, my old site is here.