David Qiao's Blog

Not sure how many of you are annoyed by the slowness of Vista. One of the main reasons for the slowness is its constantly background indexing. You see a “green ribbon of death” on explorer’s address bar? That’s the result of the indexing. On one of my HP desktop, when it is indexing, it is so slow that I have to quit using it till several hours later. The solution is to simply turn off the indexing completely by right clicking on the drive in the explorer, select “Properties” then uncheck the “Index this drive for faster searching”. Make sure in the next message box, you select “apply changes to subfolders and files”. It will take a while for this operation to complete but after that, your Vista will be super fast. Open explorer window is instant. Some people even suggest to turn off the “Window Search” service. But I still need it to search my outlook emails so I didn’t do that. So far I didn’t notice any slowness because of this.

But without the indexing, what if I want to locate  a file? Get this “everything” from http://www.voidtools.com/. Merely 340k download size, totally amazing. It took just 3 minutes to index my whole disk and after that the search for a file name is instant

In the 2.6.6 release, we introduced a small cool component called MarqueePane to JIDE Common Layer. It is open source so please fee free to give it a try. You can use it to auto-scroll any component. It is perfect for use cases such as an auto-scrolling stock tick display or an auto-fliping status, You can run webstart demo to see MarqueePane in action.

It is a very busy day while we tried to patch JIDE 2.6.6 release to resolve the serious issue with the latest Apple JDK update.

Along the line of Apple, I had a very bad experience with Apple technical support in the last few days. While I was enjoying the new MacBook Pro and said all kinds of good things about Apple during JavaOne, one problem was bothering me. I had to use Vista through boot camp on this laptop once in a while since some software applications only run on Vista. However the Vista keeps freezing randomly. After it is frozen, there is nothing you can do except doing a hard reboot. It happens several times a day and there is no clue when it will happen or which application caused it.

After a brief google, I gave up so I called Apple technical support. Their answer was simply “contract Microsoft”. From years of experience, I knew it was not an issue with Vista. It is either hardware issue (memory especially) or a hardware driver issue. Since all hardware drivers I am using are from a CD included in the MBP box so I claimed to the support ladies that Apple should provide support for it, not Microsoft. I called three times in two days. One lady simply hang up on me. The last lady directs me to a so-called Apple expert. I am surprised how arrogant he is. His name is Sean and he said “contact Microsoft and that’s the final answer” even after I pointed out to him that there are many other people reported the same issues all over the internet.

Totally frustated, I googled deeper and finally found this post below. Following that post, I believe it solved the freezing issue as it doesn’t freeze for several days. It is a driver issue with Nvidia. I included the post below just in case you had the same issue.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54536

As I said, I am not alone on this issue. It is a very common issue and Apple technical support should be aware of it and take supporting boot camp with Vista seriously. Afterall, Mac only has less than 10% market share.

Apple, you disappointed me!

Apple just released a new JDK6 on Mac. It is suppose to be a good news but it turned out to be a nightmare. They changed the package structure of Aqua L&F. Many classes that were under apple.laf package are now under com.apple.laf. This breaks pretty much everything we tried to make JIDE looking decent enough on Mac. Even more, I could change our code to use the new classes but how to make it compatible with both old and new JDK? Two sets of JIDE clasess or even two release packages? It is really werid to see Apple did such a strange thing in a minor JDK update (maybe make sense for JDK 7). Hope someone from Apple Java team can give me an explantion.

Just back from San Francisco for JavaOne. It is great to meet many friends and see some JIDE users during the conference. The slide for my TS is below. Will see you next year!

Slide for JavaOne 2009 – Bringing JTable to the Extreme

Just read an interesting news that Sun charges for the support when using the new GC called G1. Sun always had trouble making money from Java. With Oracle’s influence, things will change. I am looking forward to finding out what announcement it will be on next Tuesday during JavaOne general session.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/05/29/1711203/Java-Gets-New-Garbage-Collector-But-Only-If-You-Buy-Support?art_pos=1

It will be JavaOne next week. It had been a great experience in the last couple of years as I got a chance to meet many old and new friends each time. I will present a TS and a BOF this year.  See the schedule below.

• TS-4706 Bringing JTable to Extreme, June 6, 2009, Friday 13:30 to 14:30, Hall E 135 Moscone
• BOF-4707 JideFX: Bring Desktop Richness to the Internet, June 5, 2009, Thursday 18:30 to 19:20,  Hall E 135 Moscone

Hope you can make them. Otherwise, please drop me an email at david @ jidesof.com if you want to meet during the conference. I am looking forward to meeting you in person.

After waiting anxiously for several days, I finally got my first MacBook Pro (MBP). From the moment opening the box, I just kept wowing when I slowly uncover this beauty.

Wow #1: The box likes a briefcase v.s. all other PC laptops I got came in a cheap carton box.

Wow #2: There are not many things in the box. What’s funny are the two CD size booklets sitting side by side inside the box. One said “Everything Mac”, the other said “Everything else”. I wondered what the Everything else is so I opened it up. It is just Mac OSX installation CDs and two stickers. I still don’t understand why it is everything else. 

Wow #3: The power adapter is magnet. Very cool idea.

Wow #4: The whole body is one big piece of metal – so called unibody 

Wow #5: There are no home, end, page up, page down, delete, insert keys I used to have a G5 desktop and they still got those keys if I remember correctly. It took me a while to figure out all the equivalents

• Home = Fn + left
• End = Fn + right
• Page Down = Fn + down
• Page Up = Fn + up
• Delete = Fn + Backspace (it shows as delete on the keyboard but it is actually a backspace).

I still haven’t figure out insert key. People said it is Fn + enter but it doesn’t work as expected.

 Another important keystroke is Cmd + `. This is to switch the windows in the same application (compare with Cmd + tab to switch application). It took me a while to figure it out. 

Wow #6: The trackpad is way way cool. I finally felt no need to plug in a separate mouse anymore. The four finger swipe up to show the desktop – wow!

Of course, I still miss some features in PC world. 

1. The mail application is too primitive. I miss the grouping feature in Outlook
2. There is no JDKu10 porting on Mac. Hurry up, Apple!
3. The keyboard arrangement. Since I still have to switch between PC and Mac for different tasks, my brain is tired as I have to think about the correct keystrokes all the time which were no-brainers before

Anyway, after playing with it for several days, I got everything setup on this pretty. JIDE customers surely can expect a better support on Mac from now on

I got a technical session for JavaOne 2009 to talk about JTables. I knew JTables and JIDE Grids are used very widely among JIDE customers. So I am very eager to collect some screenshots from real applications to show what tables look like in the real world. It doesn’t have to be JIDE Grids. It could be a JTable with customization or JXTable or your own table component. I will dedicate a few minutes from the session to show those screenshots to the audience. I will of course give the credit to you. If you are interested, please email me david at jidesoft.com. I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Just so you know, we release a new icon set for Mac OS X. We are also running a promotion to sell all three icon sets (XP, Vista and Mac) at only $300, which is a very good deal. It is a good chance if you want to own your own icon sets.