Oracle & its Ugly Interface!

In the last few weeks, I had to sit and do a small web-based project using Oracle Forms. Even though database programming was something that I was always good at, yet doing this project was a killing job. Now that I look back and review what I've done, it's almost clear to me that the reason was nothing but its weird, not-easy-to-use interface, and I'm not only telling so because of my frustration or unfamiliarity with it.

Due to my thesis' experiment, I had to develop two simple applications on the iPhone and it required me to learn how to use Apple's SDK. Fortunately, I'm a Mac user and quite familiar with its platform, but programming on the Mac (and particularly the iPhone) wasn't easy at all. In fact, it took me some time and effort and I even gave up a couple of times as I couldn't find any useful resources on the net. I even purchased a book, but it was not applicable at all!

Anyhow, after sometime I could finally write codes for the iPhone, because the programming environment had an easy-to-use and logical interface that soon attracted me. For example, whenever I was opting to place a text box or label on my application window, I could drag one from the corresponding toolbox. Afterwards, XCode (iPhone SDK software development application) would show several guidelines to help me place that element at the right place, align and group it with other elements on the screen, but in Oracle?! It's just killingly awful!

I don't really want to nag all the time, but Oracle and Sun products are not user-friendly at all, and that's truly a drawback. Many of today's applications are selling well only because they are easy to use. Oracle might have some powerful and durable products, but their user interface is awful. Especially now that Oracle owns Sun, they really have to think twice and redesign their programs' interfaces from scratch. That'll make more users interested in using their products. They might not think that developers are not ordinary users. In my opinion, we're all users. Developers also have the right to work with easy-to-use solutions to develop useful, practical and user-friendly applications for the others.