Changing jobs

I'm doing something that many people in high tech do. I'm leaving my job to join a new company. I've been with SupportSoft and its acquired predecessor Core Networks since 2001. I'm joining Research In Motion later this month.

For me a job switch is a big move. I've only done one before, going from xwave to Core Networks in 2001 after 3 years at xwave and its acquired predecessor PRIOR Data Sciences. So many acquisitions in tech. Some people jump all the time, around every two years on average. But that's not my style and I'm personally a little bit suspicious of serial jumpers.

It's pretty wacky how networking and chance events can lead to new things. Last Christmas break I went to an annual road hockey game. There I met a guy who I knew over the years and worked with at PRIOR in the late 1990s. He's director level now. He was finishing up at his job after several years and was looking for a new job. We agreed to keep in touch over LinkedIn when he found a new job in case he was hiring additional people. As it turns out he landed at RIM in the first part of the year and that lead to me getting interviewed. I don't normally go to road hockey games expecting a new job to come of it but it just shows what can happen.

I don't have anything bad to say about SupportSoft. The local job market has been pretty good since around 2004 so if I was unhappy then I could have chosen to leave at any time. This just looks like a promising opportunity which I believe is in my best interest to take.

Every job has its ups and downs. Good things and little annoyances. I think expatriates mostly look back well on previous employers; even if they grumbled a bit when they worked there. I look back kindly on my time with PRIOR and xwave and I'll look back well on my seven years with Core and SupportSoft.

Java GUI coming of age

Somewhat quietly the Java JDK GUI has improved. Especially since Java 5.

I'd kind of given up on swing over the years. Everyone has bad memories of traditional Java GUIs. Battleship gray, clunky. Control-C didn't work on Windows, instead it used Unix semantics like Control-Insert for copy and paste. Select a piece of text and right click the mouse. Nothing happens.

If there was one thing which made Eclipse it was developing SWT as a much superior end user experience for Java GUI. With native widgets Eclipse was so much better. Suddenly Ctrl-C works properly on Windows. Select a piece of text and right click the mouse and the context menu comes up. Finally the GUI just looks and works the way we expect. At the time it came out SWT was the obvious and superior choice.

I have to give Sun credit. They didn't give up on JFC. They obviously worked hard to improve it. Now in Java 1.5 they pass the "10 foot test" for the first time. That is, standing 10 feet away from the computer, you can't tell that it's a Java GUI. It looks and acts much smoother now.



One of my favorite programs that I use most every day is Oracle SQL developer. This uses the JDK GUI and it is just fine to work with. It looks and feels great. The standard keyboard and mouse actions all work the way you expect. It's plenty fast.

For the first time developers can consider using swing for serious Java GUI applications.