The New "My Yahoo" Homepage

I have used my.yahoo.com as my home page for a long time. Here are my comments on the new version they are pushing lately.

- I'm not thrilled with the giant square advertisement in the upper left and most important space on the page. You can move it to the right side with the layout control but it still isn't my favorite. It's giant, square and flashy and for me a bit annoying as compared to the old layout.

- The left side blocks are too wide. I like to glance at that stuff but it doesn't have a lot of text and tends to not need the extra width. It is about 50 percent wider than it was in the old version.

- I like the idea of the personal assistant thing. It has mail, stocks and some less useful stuff in a very useful spot. My problem with it is that it grows on hover. Things that take major actions on hover kind of bug me. Mostly they just make me do the action by accident and add no real value.

- I'm not sure if it's a bigger font or more white space but it feels like I have to do a lot more scrolling to see my rss feeds.

Fear not, it's not all bad, the personalization stuff while lacking enough control is visually pleasing and trivial to use.

DZone Suggestion, More Comments

I like DZone a lot. I read it regularly and post to it when practical. I like the rising links, I like the popular links, I even like the voting system. However, one thing that would make DZone just a touch better is to encourage people to comment on blogs when they vote. I personally learn from both the positive and negative feedback and anything that can be done to encourage that feedback is welcome. So, my suggestion is to pop up an optional "Add comment" field with proceed and cancel options after any vote on DZone. Anyone is free to not comment at that point but if someone has something on the tip of their tongue they might be more likely to say it. Our experience at Terracotta in building our .org website tells us that even subtle changes can have a broad impact on what people do. I would be interested to see this A/B tested and see if it increases comment volume.

Why I love and hate statics in Java

I was chatting with some fellow geeks earlier this evening and it occurred to me that I've said to people that they should almost ALWAYS use static and also told people they should almost NEVER use static. Am I schizophrenic, a hypocrite, or just dumb. Maybe all three but it has nothing to do with this blog. I'm talking about two different language usages of the static reserved word.

USAGE 1, where the love is:
Inner classes. I hate non-static inner classes. IMHO non-static inner-class is unnecessary syntactic sugar that leads to hard to read code and subtle bugs. For those who don't know, non-static inner classes maintain a hidden instance variable holding a parent instance. It then uses specially generated methods to give access to the parent's private fields and auto-magically calls methods on the parent if no local method of the used name exists. I've seen this lead to memory leaks (people passing around instances of inner classes and not realizing that they are keeping around parents), all kinds of confusing issues with methods of the same name in inner and outer classes and variable problems of the like. On the occasions I use inner classes I almost always go with the static kind.

USAGE 2, no love here:
Static variables. With the exception of constants I have a strong dislike of static variables. Why you ask? When used to create various versions of singletons it leads to messy hidden code dependencies . It also makes it hard to do mock object stuff for testing, creates hidden initialization stuff and makes it difficult to create multiple environments in a single JVM. Just darn inflexible for no gain. I would go into details but this has been covered quite nicely here

Anyway, in summary, STATIC inner classes good, STATIC variables bad.
Goodnight ...