Ice Age

January 5th, 2009 | 32 Comments »

This has not been an easy decision to make, but unfortunately the reality sometimes interferes with our best intentions. I regrettably can no longer find time to continue maintaining Flamingo documentation and Swing Links of the Week trail on this blog.

About half a year ago our family has grown, and i have created an Amazon wishlist to allow the users of my projects to express their thanks and support the ongoing efforts being put into them. While i am thankful for the few gifts that i have received via this program (and one weird conversation about relative merits of one of the items on the list), this has not proven to be as sustainable as i hoped it to be.

Something has to go, and while documentation is still high on my list of priorities, i need to be realistic. The quasi-guiltware approach did not work, and Flamingo does not have (yet) enough users to justify the initial upfront investment in writing paid documentation (a-la JFreeChart). So, if you want to use Flamingo components (ribbon and friends), you will have to dig into the code.

The same goes for Swing Links of the Week. After more than a year of running this weekly trail, it is time to stop. You can find most of the links at DZone, JavaBlogs and java.net forums. You’ll just have to spend a little bit more time doing so :)

32 Comments on “Ice Age”

  1. 1 Femi said at 11:00 am on January 5th, 2009:

    Its unfortunate u have to stop the Swing Links.It has been a very useful resource for Java developers.Guess i will visit here less frequently

  2. 2 Jonathan Giles said at 11:10 am on January 5th, 2009:

    It’s a shame to hear this Kirill, but I can understand your reasoning – unfortunately time is limited, and family outweighs everything else, especially documentation ;-)

    Just to say, I appreciate the work you do, and am about to start a project today that for the first time will (hopefully) be designed from the ground up to use substance and flamingo.

    Cheers,
    Jonathan Giles

  3. 3 Alex Ruiz said at 11:29 am on January 5th, 2009:

    It is completely understandable and valid. Family is always first :)

    I’m going to miss “Swing Links of the Week” a lot. The links you published were great, but the best part (IMHO) was your opinion.

    Thank you so much for your awesome work!

    Sincerely,
    -Alex

  4. 4 Somatik said at 11:55 am on January 5th, 2009:

    Thanks for all the great posts the past years!

  5. 5 Danno Ferrin said at 12:06 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Thanks in particular for the swing links aggregation part. I am also in a similar position, and trips to the Zoo have always ranked above pro-bono bug fixing and such. If you lose sleep over this, it likely won’t be out of guilt but instead rocking a restless child to sleep or one of the other ways they find to wake you up.

  6. 6 Jacek Furmankiewicz said at 12:35 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Sorry to hear this, Swing Links was my must read every Monday…good luck Kirill and thanks for all your work!

  7. 7 MAROT Francois said at 1:06 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Thanks for all your Swing links (and thanks for Flamingo, I don’t know it but it’s open source so thanks anyway ;) and good luck for the future !

  8. 8 Harald K. said at 1:09 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Sorry to hear, but of course understandable.

    Thanks for all the posts and “Swing Links of the Week” in particular!

    .k

  9. 9 DC said at 1:09 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Sorry to see Swing Links go but having 2 kids myself I understand your motivation. Kids grow just once.. enjoy and don’t miss anything!

  10. 10 Panos Konstantinidis said at 1:10 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Kiril, the Swing links is among my favourites posts in this blog. Sad to hear you want to stop writing about them.

  11. 11 Besmir Beqiri said at 2:38 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Thanks for all your work and posts. It helps me a lot. Your reason is more than understandable. This will not stop me from visit your this great blog(:D) since I’m using Substance LAF in my projects (perhaps Flamingo in the near future).

    Regards
    Besmir

  12. 12 Richard Osbaldeston said at 2:55 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Your efforts where much appreciated Kirill even if I never got around to saying it out loud.. Find the java.net desktop community posts to be rather lightweight and will miss the Weekly links much like I did Scott Delaps client java site before that.

    Not sure dzone even has tags for client java, swing, javafx? or that voting is working all that well in practise.

    Guess this puts a crimp on Rémys cunning plan to infiltrate the weekly links every week ;)

  13. 13 Jean-Francois Poilpret said at 2:58 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Hi Kirill,

    that’s a sad news for me this morning, to read this post while I was expecting the latest “Swing links of the week”. I have been following these from the first time and this was the first blog I was eager to read on Tuesday morning (because of my timezone).

    The Swing links of the week was not just a list of links but your comments on each link (and funny humor sometimes) were much appreciated, I doubt we get the same level of information on dzone, but we’ll have to cope anyway.

    I remember I considered it the “hall of fame” for Swing bloggers (you cannot imagine how proud I was the first time I was in there;-))

    Thank you for all the past posts of Swing links that I will miss for sure now.

    I will for sure go on following your posts on this blog as I did before (not just the Swing links) because they are always impressively interesting (and well written).

  14. 14 Vinod Singh said at 8:44 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Though I read almost all posts here. The Swing Links of the Week along with your opinion was my favorite. Anyway you are leaving it for a better cause hence no issues :-)

  15. 15 Frank Beullens said at 11:57 pm on January 5th, 2009:

    Hey Kirill,

    also sorry to here the Swing links are dissapearing. For me also it was a must read every week. I will continue to use the excellent Substance and Flamingo libraries.
    I do understand your decision however, having tried myself to combine creating and maintaining projects and family life.

    Best regards and if you need help for some of your projects, just contact me.

  16. 16 Thierry Lefort said at 12:48 am on January 6th, 2009:

    Thank you so much for your tremendous work, I’ve learn a lot reading your posts. I wish the best to you and your family for this new year!

  17. 17 pierocielo said at 1:35 am on January 6th, 2009:

    Thank you for your swing links, I will miss it a lot…

  18. 18 Paul said at 2:02 am on January 6th, 2009:

    I agree with everyone else here; swing links of the week plus comment was my favorite blog. It’s a shame you have to stop but thanks for all the work you put in. You are prolific!

    Is there anything the community can do to make you change your mind?

    Also, do you want a job??? :o)

  19. 19 Adam Kruszewski said at 2:29 am on January 6th, 2009:

    Thank you Kirill for your hard work, but you are completely right — Family is always first.

  20. 20 Roger Padilla said at 4:36 am on January 6th, 2009:

    Hi Kirill,

    “Swing list of the week” was really my favorite read of the week. I understand you perfectly, family is the most important. Thank you so much!

    My best wishes for you and your family!

    Greetings from Cartagena/Colombia

  21. 21 Maxim Zakharenkov said at 4:43 am on January 6th, 2009:

    Hi Kiril!

    I have similar situation with my Swing Explorer project where I have a “Donate” button. During the half a year I have the button I received only 5 bucks. The 5 bucks were transferred by my buddy on my request which was done for testing purposes :) However I know that many people already downloaded and use Swing Explorer.

    On the other hand how often do you make donations?
    It looks like community got used for getting everything for free :)

    Just I want to encourage you to not stop publishing Swing Links. May be it should become a Swing Links of the month or so. I don’t think it will be too hard if you just publish some information you receive from blogs you read and your mailbox. Anyway you read them. Additionally you can just ask Swing developers to send links to you. You have quite popular page among Swing community. And it will be useful as well.

    Another option could be to have a kind of fee for subscription but I’m not sure it is right time looking at what happens with Swing now.

    Don’t work so hard! But don’t stop working at all!

    Thanks for your cool job and Happy New Year,
    Maxim

  22. 22 Pedro Duque Vieira said at 9:32 am on January 6th, 2009:

    Hi Kirill,

    Thank you very much for the swing links, i’m gonna miss them.

    I’m sure flamingo will get more credit in the future. It’s really a great library with no valid substitute. Been using it for almost 2 years.

    Thank you and congratulations for your amazing work.

  23. 23 Sebastian said at 2:34 pm on January 6th, 2009:

    Good evening,

    like all the others before me, I would really miss the Swing links and I second Maxim’s idea and hope you may consider bringing them back, maybe as Swing links of the month.

    Besides, thanks for the great libraries you provide, especially substance and its SwingX plugin are a great help in a project I am currently involved in.

    Best regards,
    S.

  24. 24 Ryan said at 4:37 am on January 7th, 2009:

    It’s sad to see the back of Swing links of the week. I am sure your links have raised the profile of Swing projetcs and Swing in general (even just among existing Swing developers).

    I always wanted to get one thing on your list too but never got around to writing a worthy blog post… bugger guess its too late now ;)

    Cheers
    Ryan

  25. 25 Marty Backe said at 1:18 pm on January 7th, 2009:

    I always read Swing Links, and will miss it like everyone else.

    I hope Substance isn’t next, but I won’t be surprised if it is; as you get older life (family, etc.) does tend to get in the way.

  26. 26 Richard Osbaldeston said at 3:27 pm on January 7th, 2009:

    Think it’s a real shame to lose resources like Swing links of the week and Client Java, can totally understand the whys.. but it’s a small fragile community that can’t sustain even noble efforts.

    It’s hard enough ‘maintaining the passion’ but doing so in abject isolation to apparent indifference can’t make it any easier. I’d say the community needs these pats-on-the-back from peers.

    How can we create a workable substitute? I mean we’re supposed to be the client side experts. Suspect Kirill has secret internal sources, his links & comments went deeper than dzone or java.net desktop traffic. The latter more a sporadic reposting of Sun bloggers.

    How is everyone else keeping up with feeds? what feeds do they have for swing/ui? I use google reader and feedly, but find the dups between feeds annoying and dzone voting useless due to noise, differing agendas and being a small community not one that could pull enough votes. Also lacks ability to follow the up votes, starred or shared links from the people who matter to you (not the great unwashed).

    Could be substitute a friendfeed? google reader shared links with annotations? mashup delicious tags, dzone voting/comments? scrapers like yacktrack.com

    Although boiling down a continuous trickle of links might take an editors touch?

    Not the right place for this discussion, its late and I’m ranting – does this make any sense?

  27. 27 davidecr said at 8:47 pm on January 7th, 2009:

    Thanks a lot for your efforts, really sad to read this. :(

  28. 28 Richard Oz said at 3:22 am on January 8th, 2009:

    One idea as several of the people whose options matter to me are already on twitter would be to create a twitter swinglinks account. Then if you see a link you could tweet it to swinglinks, wont disrupt the flow too much.

    The posts should show up in swinglinks @replies and it might be possible via followers to restrict the visible posts to a few key individuals..?

    It’s rather like tagging link tweets for future reference.. I think..? Sharing tags be it in delicious, dzone or whatever would help. That of write a scapper for the key individuals shared google reader annotated links.. possibly via yahoo pipes?

    ps evil doers I’ve already snagged swinglinks on twitter, how dumb do you think I am. Am willing to share access with the right people.. if the idea has any legs.

  29. 29 Andres Almiray said at 7:56 pm on January 9th, 2009:

    Kirill, will definitely miss Swing Links of the Week, enjoyed every bit and every comment. Alas family comes first. Long live Swing Links of the Week!

  30. 30 Swing links of the week, January 13th | Jonathan Giles said at 3:19 pm on January 12th, 2009:

    [...] that I am heavily engaged in the development of Java Swing-based applications, and the recent ‘freezing’ of Kirill’s blog posts regarding popular Swing news, I thought I would try my best to pick up the [...]

  31. 31 ilhami visne said at 12:46 am on January 13th, 2009:

    nowadays only sad news for the swing users, one after another.

    Thanks for your efforts for the community.

  32. 32 Evan Summers said at 1:32 am on January 13th, 2009:

    Pity – thanks for all the posts in 2008!