That's pretty sweet! Good link -- I'll keep that in mind. (Though it doesn't do two of the things Paul was after: open a better file-select dialog, and do local data processing on the file before sending it.)
"$17 does not strike me as a lot of money". True. Obviously Paul hasn't pledged yet. :-)
microPledge is only a few days post-launch, so success stories are low in numbers just yet. But of course we look forward to them coming in slowly but surely.
For better or worse -- better, IMHO -- Buchheit's spec on his blog entry rules out Java. Quote: "Unfortunately, Java applets don't actually work, and after 11 years of not working, I'm not expecting that to change."
My experience is contrary to that. I've deployed applets to the general public with success. (No, not 100 percent, but the same can be said of javascript and flash.)
Hmmm ... I guess I'm not the general public, but I'm running a fairly generic install of Firefox 2.0, and the page comes up with a big grey box with a red X in it. I'm not actually sure why this is, as I'm sure I've had some Java apps working in the past.
Update: Oh, the Java console shows something about an "UnsupportedClassVersionError".
That happens when you try to run a Java app that was compiled with a newer compiler on an older VM. Most likely, the demo was built with Java 1.6 and you've still got 1.5. It's working on my browser.
...It's also slow to load and incredibly clunky. Why, Swing, did you have to reimplement every native widget so that none of them look the way we expect? I think Paul's "no Java applets" remark is on the money here.
Even multi-file Flash uploaders with progress bar indicators are free and plentiful. My favorite: http://www.element-it.com/MultiPowUpload.aspx
The only trick is getting Flash to pass session variables or some other way for the server to authenticate the user.