Do beautiful, user-friendly Java applets exist?
Visual Thesaurus is the coolest / best applet I know of.
Check out PulpCore. A really awesome Java applet framework: http://www.interactivepulp.com/
Performance for it seems pretty amazing too if you check it out on bubblemark.com
The Facebook asynchronous image uploader is a Java applet.
Update: Apparently not developed in house at Facebook. This seems to be the product.
Amendment: Now that the question has been updated to be a bit more concise, I thought I'd add more to this answer.
This kind of problem, a mass image uploader (in this case), is the kind perfectly solved by a Java applet. Why?
- It uses native UI elements, so users are not confused, or have to learn a new interface.
- It can save massive amounts of bandwidth and overhead, because image transformations, such as resizing and cropping, can take place on the client side, rather than the server.
- Write once, deploy everywhere (almost, sorta).