Plaintive Mewling

I “solved” the transparent menubar problem by going through all my desktop images and removing the ones with high-contrast parts at the top from my “desktop backgrounds” iPhoto album. Complete baloney that the OS is forcing me to do that extra work — this one thing has dropped my opinion of Apple’s UI philosophy by quite a bit — but it’s done now, and I no longer have to squint at stuff like this:

Now I go to do some Java development and I see that not only has Apple still not released an official version of Java 6 after over a year of a perfectly functional preview version being available, but they actually broke the preview version on the new OS. I knew before I upgraded that Leopard didn’t ship with Java 6, but I didn’t expect my existing install to stop working.

A huge number of the Java developers I know from my consulting days migrated to Macs over the last couple years because it was such a nice Java 5 development environment, and being UNIXish it was close enough to the deployment environment to do meaningful local testing. But the broader Java world is moving on — Java 6 has been officially released for close to a year now on Windows and Linux and Solaris.

Googling around, I see that a lot of the holdup appears to be that Apple wants to fix up the GUI implementation to use the latest native libraries. That’s a fine goal, but all of the Mac-using Java developers I know are doing server-side stuff! We do not care, even a tiny little bit, what the state of Java 6’s GUI implementation is. We do care about the new language features, garbage collector improvements, and so on. I can appreciate that Apple doesn’t want to release a half-baked Java, but they could certainly release an ugly developer-only version.

I think if Apple holds off too much longer on Java 6 they are going to find an increasing number of their recent adopters switching over to Linux or Windows to avoid falling too far behind the technology curve.