Eclipse download hell
by Volker Weber
Simon Willison encounters Eclipse download hell:
One of the many thing the Mozilla/Firefox team have got right is the fantastic ease with which the application can be downloaded. Visitors to www.mozilla.org are greeted with a nice big "Free Download" link, aimed straight at the version for their (automatically detected) operating system hosted on a mirror geographically close to their IP address. It's hard to think of any way they could improve on this.
Contrast the Firefox experience to that facing anyone who wishes to download the Eclipse IDE. By far the most common usage of Eclipse is as an intelligent Java development environment, but the front page of eclipse.org makes no mention of this, instead calling it "a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular" followed by a link to a white paper. If you wanted to be pedantic about Firefox you could call it a "development platform for XUL-based web-centric applications" (and maybe mention the embedded HTML parser in a foot-note) but doing so would be utterly counter-productive.
Comments
Huh, am trying to find the Notes for OS X Ver. 6.5.3 all over the place, but IBM/Lotus seems to be the worst place to search/find anything. The process is really tedious. This thingy has been commnicated to be available since ages, but it´s nowhere to be found. I give up.
If your point is that IBM has the worst download site, you are absolutely right. I never have seen this kind of mess.
Find your Mac 6.5.3 client here.
Hi, Volker:
this is exactly what I intended to point out.
The link given (thanks, nevertheless, it´s the effort that counts) leads to this:
Operating system
Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows XP
Version 6.0.1CF
Language Japanese
Media type download
Availability Worldwide
Really cool download link, how did you know, I was learning japanese in 2 crash courses? Nevertheless, I don´t own Windows. I - like my khaki wearing cousins in the states - use OS X (spanish language preferences) :-) But maybe it´s just me who is at fault... I may be, and probably are, completely wrong.
Not kidding.
Armin
Today it is here. IBM has invented the daily changing permalink.
Domo arigato, Volker-san
I received your help via e-mail. Summarizing I can say: IBM is an adventure in downloading, they don´t save on time and cost to make our lives interesting.
Armin
