David Qiao's Blog

Here is the exciting news for all developers who hate being forced to design icons (I said it for myself . As JIDE is focused on UI design area, we think it would be nice if we can create some icons for our customers who are Java/Swing developers. Developers are not good at designing icons but icon is a very important part to any user interface. You can’t just ignore it. So after several months of hardwork, we finally release our first stock icon set with 141 professionally designed icons. This icon set is built by our graphic designer along with our developers for JIDE component products. By combining both the artistic talent and the logical thinking talent together, this icon set is designed with developer in mind which makes it extremely easy to use in any software applications, especially for Java/Swing applications which all our existing JIDE customers and users are building. It even comes with a jar file that you can put into your class path and start to use those beautiful icons right away. Anyway, you can find more information about the developer oriented features over here. Even though it is not free, the price for this icon set is at a very affordable $149.99 for the Java version which is roughly $1 per icon. At the same time, we also introduced custom icon design services to meet your need. If you dream to have a consistent user interface with a set of unique icons across all applications in your company, we are right here to help you.

Here are a few links related to this icon set.

• Icon Service Overview: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/index.html
• Icon Preview: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/preview.htm
• Custom Icon Design: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/design.htm
• Icon Set Purchase: http://www.jidesoft.com/store/index.php?cPath=33

Hope you will like those icons. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

I don’t like Vista as it is apparently slower than XP. However I discovered something nice about it. Today, I was doing a build on Vista and I double clicked on Explorer table header to auto-fit a column, I noticed it didn’t fully expanded as I knew there is a long file name in this folder. Bug? I soon realized it only auto-fits the cells that are currently visible. I have to say this is a great idea as user only cares about what they can see when they auto-fit. I verified on Windows XP, it doesn’t work like that so it is obviously a new feature Vista introduced.

TableUtils class in JIDE Grids has autoResizeAllColumns and autoResizeColumn method which will auto-fit the columns in a JTable. If JideTable#setColumnAutoResizable(true), user can double click on the table column header between two columns to auto-fit the column, just like what Excel and Explorer (pre-Vista) does. It worked greatly. However when there are a huge number of rows in that table, or the getValueAt method of the table model is very slow, the cell renderer is slow to create, it could take a long time. User reported this issue on PivotTablePane as the autoResizeAllColumns method is slow on huge pivot table. I’ve been spent time to tune it but still not satisfied with it. But this new discovery on Vista gives me the hope. I quickly changed the code and added an extra parameter “visibleRowsOnly” to TableUtils#autoResizeColumn(…). The performance is excellent (of course, as there are only 20 visible rows when I tested on a table with 10000 rows) as it took less than 1 ms comparing to ~200 ms before. So if you are using this feature in JIDE Grids, you can consider using this new feature if it makes more sense to auto-fit the visible rows only in your application.