So you have probably wondered where I've been. Possibly even missed me. Or maybe you haven't and are glad I haven't wasted any of your precious packets during the last month. In either case: I'm back with lots of interesting things on the way. I've been on vacation, traveling, spending time with family, and then back on the job working on Aerith and getting Mustang ready for Vista. So let's dive in to the good stuff:
I just arrived home after a both grueling and exciting week of JavaOne. I'm taking the next two weeks off, though I will be blogging a bit and answering the occasional emails. Don't be surprised if I'm a bit slow to respond though as I'll be in Oregon most of the time sipping coffee and enjoying the beautiful outdoors.
I'm sitting in the audience watching Tuesday's keynote where Romain Guy and Richard Bair are on stage showing the new Swing demo we built called Aerith. It's a roadtrip slideshow builder that combines Google Maps, Flickr, and Yahoo Geocode to let you make your own slideshow of photos you took on your trip. Once you are doing setting up the slideshow you can share the trip with your friends as an applet.
I'm doing lots of pre-JavaOne work right now and I could easily bore you with details of our Java.net Community Leaders meeting on Saturday, but instead I'll tease you with our demo.
We are getting closer to JavaOne and companies are preparing to announce their latest and greatest products. We will also have lots of discussions of Java vs AJAX vs Flash vs other hot tech of the day. Before we go down these and other rabbit hole discussions I'd like to take a moment to sit back and look at the big picture: Why are we here?
I'm going to be a complete nerd for a second and expound upon how amazingly cool it is that something I wrote has been translated into Japanese. I mean, writing down words that someone else pays for is cool and all, but it's even cooler when someone else translates my words into another language. The book even looks cooler. It's a tad smaller and has a very nice book jacket. The paper has a very different feel from the english printing; manga-esque actually.
I'm sure I'm the last Mac Java developer here to figure this out so I'm posting it not so much for you but for future generations intrepid googlers to find.
I'm always amazed by how big the Java ecosystem is. It really is a global community. When Chris and I wrote Swing Hacks we did it out of love for Swing, not to sell a lot of copies or make a lot of money. I'm always amazed when someone will pay for something I've written. When we hit an Amazon score of under 1000 (for a couple of hours anyway) I was bowled over.
This is totally off topic for Java, but I need to rant about computers for a second.
So here it is, I finally fixed my first bug in Mustang. By this I do not mean that I have fixed only one bug during my year at Sun, but that I finally fixed the very first one I started on. The bug is JProgressBar (indeterm.) renders wrong on WindowsLookAndFeel, Windows2000 + XP, which basically means that indeterminate progress bars look horrible on XP.
One of the great things about having a project like SwingLabs is that it gives me a place to put classes I've built that others might find useful. Today I'm going to describe my recent addition to SwingLabs, the EnumComboBoxModel, a cute little class that lets you stuff enums directly into your comboboxes with no extra work.
Some time ago I wrote an article for Slashdot discussing Be, Apple, and the future of operating systems. The mention of Be should indicate just how far ago this was. The other day I decided to try to find the article both to find out if I was at all correct in my conclusions, and to see if my writing has improved at all. Well, I couldn't find the relevant article, as Slashdot's archives are not complete (and their search engine even less so) but as I was going backwards in time I ran across some articles that are quite interesting today. I suppose it's odd to think of something as recent as 6 years ago in an historical context, but in Internet years it must be centuries. So let's dive in:
I would just like to say that I'm more and more impressed with Matisse. It does it's absolute best to provide a realistic preview of running components at design time. Today I was building some component tests and was amazed to see that indeterminate progress bars are animated while in the designer! Have a look!
I'm working on a program that requires I convert degrees of longitude into miles. Since we are mapping radians on to the sphere (mostly) that is Earth, I needed to do some trigonometric calculations. Upon whipping out some paper and pencil and drawing the triangles I needed I realized had to remember which function to use. Is it Sine, Cosine, or Tangent? Hypotenuse over Adjacent? Adjacent over Opposite? All... blurring... together....
Often times when you are building an application you need to hook multiple components together in such a way that when one component changes others must do something. When you are building custom components there is often the temptation to build a custom set of listeners to go along with it. This seems like good component etiquette; after all this is how most of the javax.swing.* components are built. Still, that's a big pain to create new listener types that must be implemented, just for observing simple changes. Plus it tightly couples your classes which can make your code brittle when making changes later. There must be a better way. And there is!
By now you've probably all read
Just a quick note to let you know that I've got a new article up about SwiXml. SwiXml is an open source library for building Swing GUI layout using XML instead of code (ie: the evilness that is GridBagLayout). In the article you'll learn what you need to get started using it and how it works. Check it out and let me know what you think. Also let me know what other articles you'd like to see. I'm looking for new ideas. Thanks Josh
I know it's been quite a while since I've written anything. I've been busy with quite a few project and I'll have some cool stuff to share soon. In the meantime I thought I'd show you an interesting tidbit I discovered in Matisse and Netbeans.
As some of you may know I'm a big Mac person. I split my time equally between my iBook (now heading back to the shop, alas) and my WinXP desktop. Being a dyed in the wool plain jane text editor type of programmer I've used jEdit for the past five years and have only recently started using an IDE like Netbeans. I've found Netbeans to a great productivity booster but on my iBook it seems to generate garbage at a mad pace. This is okay, it's just garbage, not a memory leak; but it's a pain when the editor locks up for five seconds to do garbage collection. Fortunately there is a solution.