The first 2000 pixels

You know certain words are definitely lame when you hear your parents use them in everyday speech. Consequently, when IBM managers peek over their developers' shoulders and get a really novel idea to start a blog, you know it is time to create a new thing (preferably with an age limit). However, armed with a complete lack of self-awareness that is typical of managers and older people (sign me up for one of each), I decided to stay the course. After all, I can write a boring blog like the best of them.

The title of the blog and the matching header I painstakingly selected from a list of templates should reflect that I care about pixels. My several prior lives as a developer in IBM somehow always revolved around the UIs. I am the proud founding father of JFace before it was made part of Eclipse, and one of the original members of the Platform UI team (and I have an 'Eclipse Founder' shirt to prove it). I am also the father of PDE (as you can see, I am big on parenting), but all the damage I have done is now systematically rectified by the current PDE owner Wassim Melhem. As Scott Adams would say, since then I have been moved to an area where I can do the least damage - the management. The only sandbox I can play in to earn my developer stripes are now the UI Forms.

UI Forms started in PDE and many people still think they are a part of it. I don't blame them, since I used PDE as a show case for the technology. However, UI Forms are now completely standalone and are sitting much deeper in the stack - as an optional RCP plug-in. To me, they have it all - all the pixels I can eat, the excitement, the sexy (if you don't believe me, believe the blogger Chris Aniszczyk and one of his recent posts). And this is a great time to be in Forms, being recently refreshed and with all the new goodies that you can read about in the Eclipse 3.3 M5 New & Noteworthy (at the time of writing, M5 has not been posted yet, but my pent up creative juices cannot wait on the Eclipse process to play itself out).

And now, the $5,000,000 question: why should I add this blog into my bulging feed aggregator? Because: 1) you like Eclipse, 2) you like sexy UIs and 3) you understand that UI Forms can get you there if only you could ask the guy who wrote that code how the darn thing works.

And who knows, maybe, just maybe, I may be able to share a pearl of wisdom beyond the pixels every once in a while. They say old people are wise. That's a lie and you know it but I am willing to play along.