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.

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 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

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.

There is one missing feature in ButtonPanel. That’s the arrow key support. On Windows (probably on Mac as well), people get used to use left or right keys to navigate among buttons on a horizontal button panel or up/down keys for vertical button panel. However Swing doesn’t have that. For example, in the JOptionPane, arrow keys don’t change button focus. So I decide to add this feature. it has about 200 lines simple code. I included it below. The javadoc tells you how to use it. It is already checked in to JIDE Common Layer so feel free to check it out and use it. JIDE’s ButtonPanel called it already. JideOptionPane, since it uses ButtonPanel, also works beautifully.

I had been working closely with Wolfgang in last couple of months or so trying to support Synthetica L&F in all JIDE product lines. I am glad to say we are finally there. You can find some nice screenshots of our demos under various Synthetica themes below. They are all taken under JIDE 2.2.8 release with Synthetica 2.7.2/SyntheticaAddons 0.9.7.

• Black Moon Theme
• Black Start Theme
• Blue Ice Theme
• Blue Moon Theme
• Blue Steel Theme
• Green Dream Theme
• Mauve Mmetalic Theme
• Orange Mmetalic Theme
• Silver Moon Theme
• Sky Metal Theme
• White Vision Theme
• Standard Theme

Wolfgang, thanks for the support. The Synthetica L&F looks awesome.

As I mentioned before, I had an interesting BOF session for the this year JavaOne. The title is “Workaround Swing Bugs”. Even though it was conflicted with the afterdark party, there was still a decent number of people showed up. Since several people asked for it, I post the slides and the demo source code below.

Slides for BOF-5133
Demo Souce Code for BOF-5133