All about the tools
I spent a good hour or so today downloading and briefly playing with all the latest popular IDEs. I have this thing in the back of my mind that if I could find the perfect IDE and learn it backwards and forwards I could become "SuperProductive." I downloaded the new NetBeans (slow), Oracle jDev (neat but slow), Eclipse (fast, weird), IntelliJ 2.6 (great, a bit slow, expensive) and JBuilder (partially disabled) last night.
I think I may actually give Eclipse another run because it's so responsive. I'll make a statement right now that if Sun had implemented something like SWT 3 years ago, Java would rule the desktop today and .Net would be a laughing matter instead of threat. Instead Sun chose to play the "pure Java" game, and lost any momentum on the desktop, maybe for good.
-Russ
Later... Here's a cool article about SWT. Very cool... Stop being stubborn Sun! Kill SWING!