I’m looking now at Java’s update application that wants to offer me latest version of it:

• the progress dialog has fonts remembering about the times of Windows 95
• it’s impossible to move the dialog window
• clicking on close button has no effect on it neither
• after freezing 30 seconds or so it gives me a message box that I’ve cancelled operation and shows a URL with ~30 characters that I can’t click.

Pathetic experience.

I’m not about Java on servers and in the Enterprise, nor about the language. Why the Windows runtime/installers cannot be polished enough so that when it happens to meet the user face-to-face he wouldn’t run scared?

I have had similar “unnatural” feelings when I’ve started using FreeMind, a mind mapping software. It’s the only Java application I remember on my PCs. It works and gets job done. But it looks awful.

Anybody have a good example of any Java application that looks OK in Windows?