Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The NetBeans workaround effect

NetBeans continues to toy with my fantasies. It is simpler than Eclipse, and far more humane. There are no Eclipse quirks, like having to reconfigure your environment whenever you want a different workspace. And the visual editor, which builds off of the Swing Application Framework, allows you to do slam together a few components together to try things out.

But the quality! Ugh! There were 2-3 moments today alone where the editor simply froze when doing editing. I am not sure who is making the QA decisions for Sun, but these kinds of experiences leave me asking do they care? Which is sad, because I'm sure they do — but someone won the argument to ship it.

In the end, NetBeans is now my Prototyper. I use it to create prototypes, particularly for GUIs. Once I get familiar with what I want, however, everything gets transferred to Eclipse.

What I find interesting is that I haven't really bitched about this, other than this blog.

There is a lesson here for other products. If people start having problems with your products, they will probably start finding a workaround. And not tell you.

For Java editors, where you have the Eclipse beast — lots of crap, but free, and generally works — I seriously doubt there's a market for competition. And so we are left with this: feel like you are overpaying for a product, or getting used to workarounds.

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