joustlog

Recently Joshua Marinacci announced that he was developing a new JDIC sub-project called “JDIC Misc.,” which provides some cross-platform functionality which does not fit in any of the other JDIC projects.

JDIC Misc. allows you to:

• alert the user that an important event has occurred in your application (like AIM or iChat does when you receive a message).
• show a custom menu on the taskbar/dock item(s) for your application
• manipulate the computer’s master sound volume
• set the desktop wallpaper

I looked at the Javadoc for these new API’s and saw lots of design, implementation, and code style problems. I will discuss them here.

Design problems

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An irritating feature of the Gnome desktop is that when you have a remote folder or a CD/DVD drive, you can’t drag it to the Trash to remove or eject it. I always assumed it was something the Gnome team had overlooked, but over on the Gnome bug tracker you can see that they like this behavior, according to Red Hat developer Alexander Larsson who marked this bug as WONTFIX.

I can’t imagine what went through Alexander Larsson’s head when he made that decision. Maybe the team doesn’t have time to implement it, maybe they don’t understand their users, maybe I don’t understand Gnome’s users.

It seems completely obvious to me that if I drag a desktop icon to the Trash, I want it to go away. I don’t care how it’s done, if it means dropping the remote folder connection, or ejecting the CD, I want the icon gone.