I'm not blaming Sun for this in any way, shape, or form, but JavaFX is only available on 64-bit Intel Macs, that is, Core 2 Duo systems. This is because JavaFX requires Java 6 and Apple only provides Java 6 for 64-bit Intel Mac OS X. I can understand Apple's decision not to provide Java 6 for PowerPC, but I'm at a loss to understand why they wouldn't support 32-bit Macs. This means that early MacIntel adopters (ie suckers) like me don't get to try out JavaFX (or Java 6 for that matter). It doesn't help that my second computer is running Ubuntu, which isn't supported either :( Oh, and my Windows Boot Camp partition is useless too, because my iMac is on a WPA2 wireless network, and XP SP2 out of the box supports only WEP :( *Sigh*...what to do?

Waiting for Linux support.

I've done quite a lot of reading on and about JavaFX and I still trying to download the preview sdk (if only my internet would stop misbehaving) but from the little I have read and seen, I wondeer if Sun still missed the point (slightly, if not big time with JavaFX) JavaFX in its own right is cool and all and I have been impressed with the overall presentation from the applets and examples I've seen. But I think that in order for Sun's ambition to make something comparable to flash, they would have to emulate the flash player architecture. We already have everything it takes to do this (ie fast starting applet plugin and a wealth of libraries). Now what we need is a "Player" and a "File Format". From what I can see, JavaFX simply makes developing a standard Applet faster (but not necessarily smaller), hence we might still be stuck with the long download times that we still have now. I suggest that we rather get a declarative way of creating our UI (as we do now with JavaFX) and then create a cross-platform player type component that will be distributed with all JRE's (ie a pre-installed applet) that simply parses this declarative type document to create its UI, add event listeners and so forth. Hence we will only need to pass the document (".jfx" file format if necessary) to our applet tag, which can probably be as huge as 400Kb MAX (aside the images and multi-media that can be downloaded later by the application itself when fully loaded). Hence, at startup, no images or media is loaded, just the bear essentials to create image place holders, labels, progressbars etc. This way, I believe (ie if I cant guarantee) that applets will launch almost immediately (since the player is on the user's system already) and user interaction can then easily be controlled by the content of .jfx file (including download progress and all) I wonder if I everything I'm saying is exactly what JavaFX is supposed to do, but if not, then I guess it needs to be considered.

I have downloaded the SDK on both Windows and OS X, but I am really waiting for OpenSolaris support.