Guis

GUI code is the most tedious unsatisfying code ever. It's totally ironic that it's also maybe the most important part of the application; that's if you're planning on showing your work to non programmers. No nontechnical person cares at all how elegant or wonderful or useful or powerful your program is, if it's not wrapped in a nice flashy buttoned, color-gradient happy gui. I'm cool with the command line and a nice log file, and probably so is the hacker next door, but Joe consumer wants his menus and his checkboxes, and if I'm to get my work any attention at all I must satisfy his eye's opprobrious lust for doodads.
Even worse than the basic need for GUIs, is the fact that the APIs (on the Desktop) are all sequential, imperative, spaghetti. Swing is the quintessential java example: the API is complicated, you're encouraged to violate MVC, and there's no telling what the GUI looks like from staring at the code. At least in HTML you get an idea of the general layout; in swing you get nothing but pain.
I've been looking for alternatives to Swing. I like the look of JavaFX, but it's not out yet. I saw something called Rebol, but the language is proprietary and I don't see any hooks for tying it into the JVM (which is a must for me, cause I need my libraries). Anyway, I figure the best solution is probably some XML templating thingamabob that lets you write your swing code declaratively. Right now though I'm too discouraged, so I'm slacking off and blogging.