JavaOne 2005: Schedule planner is crap!

This year they changed the JavaOne schedule planner. OMG!

I must admit that for a $1695 conference fee the new schedule planner is pretty much worthless. Especially since the last few years they had a really nice planner application that could give you like timetables showing all sessions at a certain day, at a certain timeslot, making it fairly easy to compare sessions by description or contents or speaker. It even had this cool ‘export to XML’ feature! So, I wrote a simple application to convert the xml MySchedule output into vCal events for my PDA. Cool, right?

Now with this new schedule planner all they have is a very much not user friendly database querytool that shows you all sessions of all types at once. Ofcourse totally mixed up and without any additional info. Although this querytool is supposed to have advanced options to just show e.g. Technical Sessions or BOFs, it isn’t able to say filter out some session types, e.g. show everything except BOFs. Not that I have anything against BOFs, but since there are tons of them I get so many results that I totally loose it. Argh! All of the other useful filtering options like: show me all sessions in the timeslot 10.00 am till 11.00 am, are impossible. Instead they implemented nifty, but totally useless features like: search for sessions by speaker. Like I know all speaker names by heart… :o(

Then there is this really advanced option of saving your personal schedule as a CSV file! Yes! This is truly awesome! Unfortunately implementing this feature took them so much time that they had to drop the ‘export as FoxPro database’ feature. Sad…

I already sent an e-mail to the conference organizers about two weeks ago with my little complaint. Unfortunately no reponse as of yet. The other day I found Klaasjan’s Haiku contemplating his beef with the schedule planner, so I thought..hey let’s make this a global quest! So here’s my plea to Sun…the commercial conference event organizer… whoever… c’mon, give us the old schedule planner back! No? Hmmm, maybe if I just say please…PLEASE! :o)