The robust plug-in model certainly gives it a shot at dealing with the UI holes your talking about..don’t know it if will really pan out that way.

Thanks for engaging.

i don’t know, i’m sort of torn. on the one hand i think the Swing-style lowest common denominator butt-ugly UI is a thing of the past, on the other i think both Windows and OS X are headed down deep UI holes that will be tough to follow - let alone make cross-platform.

short answer is: i don’t know
Stephen: thanks for bringing up RCP. IBM’s usage of the platform as the foundation for Notes and so on was - I think - a real eye opener for some folks. i do think they need more focus on the “prettiness”, if you will, b/c while i like some of the RCP apps i’ve used or demoed (RSS Owl, the Notes port, etc) - they don’t blow me away. they’re nice, but note gorgeous.

We used to be just windows machines at work - now we have macs, linux etc. Why? Because the world is changing. Previously it was windows only at work which partly drove the decision what we have at home and vice versa.

We used to have 2 windows machines at home. Now we have 2 macs instead because they just work better for the kids.

When it was windows on both ends of the work/home equation the cross-platform perspective wasn’t an issue. Now it is. And I don’t think we are alone in that. Software like Parallels (sp?) for the mac is just a stop gap for people eventually having/wanting cross-platform apps. You could argue virtualization will *prevent* cross platform apps but I don’t see it that way. Why? Because it will be in the vendors best interest to develop once in something like Eclipse (it could be something else, Eclipse just seems the most likely at this point) rather than the cost burden of multiple development environments, application update mechanisms for seperate OS’s. And it’s not just the cost of the development environment itself, it cascades across a software shop in terms of training costs, hiring practices etc..

P.S. Today IBM announced you can get Eclipse support directly from IBM. For enterprises and even ISV developers I think that’s probably as significant for Eclipse as it was for IBM to put their weight behind Linux. It legitimizes it for a whole swath of people that otherwise would have sat on the fence or not considered it as an option because they had no one to turn to if something went wrong. And just like Linux, Eclipse is making it thru the back doors of organizations.

P.P.S. I also thing it would be in Apples own best interest to support something like Eclipse. All of a sudden you have alot more apps appearing for the Mac that otherwise may have only appeared on Windows. And it would be better for them to have class A support before Linux get’s there. I’m not sure what they are doing on that front.