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NetBeans 6.0 M9 & Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Hacking a small Java interface for video transcoding was the reason for installing the M9 of NetBeans 6.0. At a first glance I was really shocked by the Metal Look & Feel. See the screenshots & decide yourself

For everyone suffering the same shock … following startup parameters make NetBeans pretty again:

~/netbeans-6.0m9/bin/netbeans -laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel


NetBeans 6.0 Preview: I tried it …

Although I’m always interested in the NetBeans projejct progress I was quite away from the topic until recently (no time, administrative stuff, project proposals, same things all the time …). With the announce of a preview release (actually version 6.0 M9) I woke up and gave it a try. Here are my first impressions:

• First look gave me a warm feeling. This does not look like a creepy Swing application any more. They changed some icons. Result: Interface got more friendly. I like it!
• The editor is rather usable: It got somewhat faster and the auto completion is now quite easy to use (it works in the way I expect it to work . Still there is a long way to go: I’d like it faster and my favorite refactoring options are missing (selecting some expression and creating a field or a variable from it, etc.)
• One more about the editor: When an import is not yet added (by typing in for example a class, which has not yet been imported), the respective term gets underlined in red and one can automatically import the class by clicking the light bulb at the head of the line or by hitting <alt>-<enter>. This works fine with one exception: If you hit it too fast a line break is added. But well this is M9, hopefully it will be fixed in the release
• One can use subversion and CVS at the same time (no need to switch by installing things)

That’s it from my point of view in the first 15 min. with M9. I’d recommend: Give it a try!

Netbeans 5.5.1 RC1 out

Version 5.5.1 contains mostly bugfixes as well as the v2 GlassFish server. Find the announcement as well as links to the release notes and the download here.

Netbeans 6.0 – A Reasonable IDE Option?

Having heard a great deal about Netbeans 6.0 and I installed it some days ago (some daily build: 200702162122). My main intention was to find out if it was time to switch to Netbeans … and in my humble opinion NB 6 will be a reasonable alternative to Eclipse and Idea with 6.0!

So here are my findings:

• The new editor is great (compared to the old one)! It’s fast enough, has meaningful shortcuts (roughly the same as IntelliJ Idea) and it works rather smooth and does what one likes it to do.
• The GUI editor is great and the only (free) GUI editor that simply works. Furthermore the built-in i18n things are really really cool! (totally missing in Idea).
• Most of the refactoring is missing, but I hope it will find its way in until the final version.
• The same goes for the code completion: It is there in different flavors, but it does not do what one might expect.
• Using <alt>-<enter> in the editor while text is selected brings up a new template dialog, which is a combination between “Surround code with ..” and Live Templates.

The daily build proved rather stable and I continue to use it. However there is one thing that nearly drove me mad: I created a panel and set it to CardLayout. Then I put in three panels in the CardLayout panel. After that I wasn’t able to move the CardLayout panel any more (dragging it around in the GUI editor)! At last I found a workaround: Giving the CardLayout panel an empty border one can then drag the panel around using the border pixels 8-).