Roo’s Ramblings

Jacman is one of my favourite projects. I had a lot of motivation to work on it when I conceived the idea. Plus, it seemed to get a good reception for its v0.1 release. However, development had pretty much ceased. This was largely due to my relocation and new job. Plus, Jon-Anders (Sonix) has a busy workload with his studies. That said, possibly the largest factor was because my motivation had faded due to underwhelming reviews.

You see, I wrote Jacman for others. I used to see many calls in the forums for GUI front-ends. I wasn’t bothered myself - I’m fine with the command line. Yet, it seemed like a cool project and I went for it. The problem is, any negative comments about Jacman is rarely about the program itself - but simply about my choice of language. Perhaps I should have known better than to use non-Free software on an otherwise Free platform. Oh, and of course, “Java is slow”. My point is that I can never seem to have a discussion about Jacman - it always goes off on a tangent about the language! Anyone who saw the Jacman thread on the forums this week will have witnessed this.

Anyway, I’ve decided not to let Jacman fade away. I’ve been dipping into the code most nights this week - just adding a few lines here and there. Hopefully the code for the next release will be stable by this time next week, after which I’ll send out a call for translators. For the releases after that, I’ve had some great ideas on how to make the user experience even better, but I’ll keep that to myself for now. Basically, my approach now is to avoid language debates and just let the program speak for itself. I still belive that of all the pacman front-ends in development, it’s functionally ahead, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?! Fortunately, Jon-Anders and I have plenty of ideas on where to take Jacman in the future to improve it in terms of functionality and usablility.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 12:14 am and is filed under ArchLinux, Programming, Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.