Anyone using SWT?

General Discussions
#1

Since Java on OS X is pretty much crap, I’ve had a hard time finding a usable IDE to work in. Netbeans is slow and very un-Maclike (it’s what I use and like very much on Windows). I even had the chance to try IDEA on a company computer and while it fits in better on OS X, it’s really slow (as in it there’s a very noticeable delay between typing and text showing up on the screen). So I finally downloaded all 80+ megs of Eclipse, and found it to be a very good OS X application. There are a few quirks, but overall it’s fast and looks almost native. Is this because it uses SWT instead of Swing? Has anyone had any good experiences with SWT?

::sigh:: here’s to hoping (OS X) Tiger will finally make Java viable on the Mac…

#2

Since Java on OS X is pretty much crap,

Say what? I hope you just mean “the AWT performace of”.

Since Java on OS X is pretty much crap,

Netbeans 4.0 looks like a Mac app, acts like a Mac app (with the right keys!), and performs just as well as any other Mac app. No idea what your complaint is.

Now if you were using 3.6, then I feel your pain man. :-/

#3

I was indeed talking about 4.0. It does not look native at all. For one thing, the menubar is part of the frame, not at the top of the screen. Also, there are menu mnemonics, which there OS X doesn’t have, and all of the menus are in the wrong font and size (should be Lucida Grande 12). And I guess the “^” symbol is the control key, but all menu shortcuts on OS X use the command key. Another thing that really stands out is that huge space before each menu item. It’s there for an icon (which OS X apps shouldn’t even use), but those that don’t have icons just leave these spaces. There is much more…

Really the only thing they got right is that the app is a single package with no external files. But otherwise the port is pretty bad. Swing can do a lot better if they bothered to code it right.

#4

I did a lot of the work to modify NetBeans key bindings to be Mac-friendly - you’ll note that almost all keybindings in NetBeans do use Command on the mac, where they would use Ctrl on the pc. Find-Next is even remapped to Command-G just for the mac, rather than F3 on the PC.

The developers of the refactoring functionality, probably just didn’t know how to set it so it would be assigned based on what platform NB was running on. I’ve filed http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=57042 - it will be fixed before 4.1 is released.

Re the screen menu bar, this is a known and painful problem. You can switch it on manually, but a few menu items and submenus won’t work - this is because of a few evil JMenu subclasses that made it into our APIs back in 1998 or so, and so for backward compatibility it’s been impossible to remove those classes. We’re planning to root out the last uses of them for 4.2, so the screen menu bar should work right thereafter.

#5

I am doing an SWT app for mac, and it does look native, so does any menu bar you will create.

Avtually we are developing a program for mac on windows platform. The only trouble we have is with the filesystem(obviously), since mac is unix based and win is well, windows.

I only see one problem atm that is that the menu displayes the class name, in our case “werkstette.widgets.TestWidget”, so if you find somw way to remove that let me know will ya? :wink:

#6

Start it with -Dcom.apple.mrj.application.apple.menu.about.name=MyApp
or, if you’re packaging it in the proper .app directory structure for OS-X (mac
users will thank you for doing this!), I believe you can set this in your
Info.plist