# Start up OOo Impress and create a new presentation.
# Open up the master slide view and create two new masters; make them somewhat visually distinct so that its easy to experience the pure frustration later.
# Return to the slide view and make sure you can see the Master Pages area of the Tasks page; note that both your master slides are listed as “used in this presentation”, but not “available for use”.
# Click the first master, which should re-apply the master to the slide you’re looking at.
# Click the second master to apply it to the slide.
# *Note that the first master has now disappeared.*
# Think to yourself, “well surely it’s not gone and return to the master view.
# Realize that no, the slide really has disappeared.

Is it any surprise that you see a proliferation of Macs and Keynote at tech conferences, that people think slide-ware generally sucks, or that people still equate PowerPoint with presentations?

I _think_ this is the same as Issue #43354, reported in *February, 2005*. Sigh.

Java Applets Reborn from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

So the most interesting things (to me):

* The plugin itself is mostly written in Java. I love these sort of recursive language exercises (see “PyPy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyPy), if nothing else for their “turtles all the way down”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down effect. But I suppose this actually makes a certain degree of sense: if you have a fixed set of resources and you’re putting lots of them towards improving the JVM/JRE, you can take advantage of those improvements by writing your plugin in Java. They don’t talk about the architecture of the old plugin much, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find out the native-code “shim” used to communicate between the browser and the JVM is easier to maintain than the old plugin was.
* Applets run in a completely independent process (not just thread).
* An applet can demand to run with a particular JRE version. They label this “enterprise support.” I’d call it “sanity support.”

None of this really speaks to whether it’s too little, too late. It seems like a good move on Sun’s part, especially given the recent attention on rich internet applications (RIAs) has focused (not necessarily undeservedly) on “Flash”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash, “Adobe AIR”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR (the vapor-ware jokes write themselves, don’t they?) and “Microsoft Silverlight”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight. The amount of press and attention may indicate this is an area whose time has come. And while I admit having a begrudging soft spot for Java, it seems that companies (especially capital-”E” “enterprise” companies) who already have lots of in house Java expertise could benefit from being able to extend that knowledge down to the desktop. Maybe.