1. I want to decide what application to install
The current situation how Apple is handling the app store an treating it’s customers is not acceptable any more. I have bought a phone and own the hardware so I decide what kind of applications are on my device. If apple want to protect their users it’s ok for me but they have to find a possibility to support my need too. Just watch Json’s comment on this issue in his This week in Startups.

2. Download my pod casts directly on my iPhone
This is really what I was missing until the beginning. Where is the refresh button like in the iTunes to update all pod casts with the new content. I don’t understand why I have to go to the app store to click on the new episode by hand and get an message afterwards that says “Sorry file is too big and can’t be loaded over the 3G network”. What is the issue with big files? I have a 3Gb all inclusive package it’s no big deal to download 20Mb.

3. Mark positions in a pod cast
While listening to pod casts or books on your iPhone, and I am listening to much of them, there is no possibility to mark positions for later research. I am really missing that. While listening to something interesting there is often no time to write it down or search the web for further information. I don’ want to search several minutes in the audio file to find the correct position to get the information I was looking for.

4. Us it as a USB Storage device
What have I bought here? – was the first reaction when i tried to store files on the iPhone. I had an old iPod and never thought that using it as a USB storage device wouldn’t be possible. The WebDav applications are no real replacement because there is sometimes no open WI-FI network available to transfer the data.

5. Bluetooth Profiles
Ok, I really don’t get this – why transferring pictures or vCards form a other phone to the iPhone via Bluetooth is not supported? MMS was/is not available so how can data be transferd from a phone that does not have a mail client? In general there is no reason why they support so view profiles.

6. Customizable Tones
The notification from the calendar that reminds me of a new appointment is not even hearable in room where nobody speaks, not to mention to sit in a open space. I am not fan of the typical Nokia notification tone for an appointment but at least you can hear it.

7. Better Gmail Application
The current mail application on the phone is one of the best of mobile systems I have ever seen but for a Gmail user I really missing the possibility to assign several different labels to a message and the powerful Android client and the web client is not a real alternative.

8. Better Calendar
At leas for me the G1 calendar was really grate to work with. It would be so nice to have a week view like in Outlook or calendar in a wide screen view to see the my appointments of the whole week.

I know that most of the features are available in a jailbroken iPhone but why is Apple treating it’s customers to do that? Just see the phone as a platform and not as a device you have to protect.

SMILA was the second talk I attended that day. The framework is still in the incubator of the Eclipse projects. It tries to build an backed Architecture for searching. They are using JMS to divide the crawler from the indexing logic. All of the components can be changed. For indexing and converting they are using a BPEL engine tho be able to extend the functionallity easily. The project looks nice and may be we will try the framwork in the future for one of our products. At the moment there are no sources or binaries available so we will have to wait to evaluate it.

The rest of the day I attended some of the talks for a while but most of the time i used for discussions with members of the community.

The last talk I was interested in was about BIRT the well known Reporting engine in JAVA. It was nice to see some of the new features and I got some impressions how I will be able to integrat this into our current projecte where a little more than just reporting is neede.

In the end I have to say that it was really a good decision to go there even if I was not able to prepare me for the conference because of the short -term decision. Anyway I hope that I will be able to attend the EclipseCon next year.

Thanks for Rupert he posted the Link to the presentations and resources of the conference as comment in my last posting.

The first session I could attend was “Aspect Weaving for OSGi”. Aspects are not new to me but the presentation gave some more impressions about the integration in OSGi. The Interesting part there is that as you might now Bundles in OSGI have their own class loader which means that they are divided from each other. For Aspects this is a big issue special if they need to be wave in the logic within runtime. At the moment we are using Aspects but weave their functionality into the classes while compile time. I have to give the bundle project a try if it will solve some issues we have at the moment with aspects (e.g. automatic building).

After that i just stayed in the room to hear the talk about “Service Discovery and Remote Services within the Eclipse Communication Framework”. What they are trying is the logic if the service is running local in an OSGi container or if it is somewhere in the cloud. Nothing of the concepts are new but they also gave some impression about their work they are doing on an other Project which is dealing with collaboration. This is more interesting for me special beaus we may need some of thees functionalities in the future in our product.

After that talk we had lunch and i start talking to some people. As some of you might know I really like talking therefor i missed the next Track .

At leas for me the most interesting talk was “Best Practice for Equinox and OSGi”. It was not that they where telling new stuff further more they where questioning Architecture concepts within the enviroment (e.g. Extension points). The arguments are the same as I am using when i describe while we used an Registry instead of the Eclipse Extension point concept. Most of them are dealing with testability and the possibility to not have to rely on Eclipse or OSGi at all. This is from special interest if you have an architecture where bundles or at least code of them should run on server and client. They also mentioned to use declarative services instead of the services trackers available in OSGi. I also don’t like the concept of the trackers and the static method for service resolving, but I would prefer Proxy objects generated within runtime that are hiding the service tracker from the rest of the world. I must admit that I don’t have this much information about declarative services that I can say to prefer the one against the other.

The next session that impressed me at leas a little bit was “Single Sourcing: Extend your RCP application to the Web with RAP”. What I saw at the talk was the simple mail application that was ported straight forward with RAP to a web application. Of course they had to do some shortcuts and not everything is working, but i will give it a try to get an impression. Maybe we can use this in the near future.

The last session was “EclipseLink: High Performance Java Persistence”. I just got a view hints about the API but nothing really new to me.

I have to say that the people within the Eclipse community (I am the first time at an Eclipse Conference) is are smart and have good ideas. The issue with all the JAVA environment is just that the community is slowing down in the bigger project and hundreds of small new projects are started to compensate this. There is one big issue in this whole Ecosystem; to find the correct concepts, bundels, plugins for your need. If you are not attending Conferences like this one you will get lost in the amount of projects available for this environment.