Author Archives: Michael Kölling

BlueJ is 10

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I’m late, I admit it.

A day late, to be exact. Yesterday (23 August 2009) was BlueJ’s 10th birthday.

BlueJ-cake-small

As BlueJ’s version history shows, BlueJ 1.0 was released on 23 August 1999. It was born in Australia – in Melbourne, to be more exact. The project went through various changes, ending up spread across the world, with one half of the team still in Melbourne, and the other in Canterbury in the UK.

It’s not to be taken for granted that a university project survives that long, so I am really grateful to all members of the team – past and current – and to the extremely supportive user community for sticking with it for so long.

Happy Birthday BlueJ!

New Greenfoot video: Sharing

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In the past, a question that often came up after people had implemented their Greenfoot scenarios, was: How can I give this game I made to my friends?

For a while now, Greenfoot has an answer to that: the Export function. Greenfoot can transform scenarios into stand-alone applications, prepare them to run in a web page, or even publish them to an open web server for the whole world to see and play.

Since this is a FAQ, I have made a video that explains this i more detail. Enjoy!

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Play video Icon_External_Link

The new blog

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Welcome to my new blog home.

My previous blog – mrt – is being replaced with this one. The reason is just that my university now offers hosting of blogs for us, so I can stop running my own blog software. This removes work and hassle for me, and makes my life easier – always a good thing.

I have moved the contents of the old blog over here, and the old one will shortly be removed. If you have a bookmark, please update it now.

Greenfoot Coding Contest: CodePoint 2008

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CodePoint 2008 – The 1st Annual Greenfoot Coding Contest – opens for business on 15th October.

If you use Greenfoot, or if you like writing Java programs, or if you want to win a great prize, have a look at the web page for

CodePoint 2008

You can win a Wii Games Console, or an iPod Touch, or even a Greenfoot coffee mug!

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It’s open: The Greenfoot Gallery

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For the past few months, we have worked on creating the Greenfoot Gallery – and now it’s finally officially open.

The Greenfoot Gallery is a place for people to publish their Greenfoot scenarios, and try out other people’s work, comment on it, rate it, etc. Think of it as a kind of YouTube for Greenfoot games. Have a look!

You can use the Gallery (look at scenarios, play) straight away, or you can create an account for yourself to comment on them or upload your own.

Uploading content to the Gallery is easy: Use the ‘Export’ function in Greenfoot, and you’re almost there.

Programming is not hard – Knowing what to program is hard

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Programming is not hard.

Sure, there are plenty of examples you can pull out of the bag that have really brain-numbingly complex algorithms in them, and they are indeed hard to program, but they are really the exception. For most programmers and most programs, this is not the case.

Most programs that fail do so not because the implementation is done badly or fails altogether, but because they implement the wrong things. Its not that the programming was hard, but that they programmed something nobody wants.

Deciding what you should program is where all the beef is.
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Stupidity or just refreshing honesty?

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Just as everyone else, I regularly get spam. One of the common scams are “phishing” mails – pretending to be from a bank or other institution where you might type in your password.

Today, I got one that appeared to be from the NatWest bank. With this one, the scammers actually had a better starting point with me than most, since I actually do have an account at that bank (so it’s not quite as obvious as being asked to update my details at some bank in Timbuktu that I’ve never heard of).

But I don’t think the scammers quite thought this through to the end, as you might notice looking at the URL that the “Log in” button links to – stupidity or just refreshing honesty?