Just getting better and better

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

First, Happy 10th birthday, Java! Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Birthday Party...

The "Gray Rectangle" issue in Swing has been fixed! This is the problem where you'd for example hit the "Finish" button on some dialog
in a Swing app, and for a second or two the screen would show a gray unpainted rectangle where the dialog was just dismissed
while the app is computing like mad. No more. Swing now (as of recent Mustang (JDK 6) builds)
does true double buffering, so it will restore the previous window contents immediately even if the AWT thread is busy.
You can read more about this in
Scott Violet's blog. And check out
all the other nice improvements happening in the Java desktop area.

Speaking of Swing applications, NetBeans has released a
4.1 release candidate. You should definitely give it a try. It has a number of really nice improvements from 4.0, such
as the navigator, or the jump to declaration hyperlinks, or lots of usability fixes - see Roumen's blog
here,
here
and here for example.
To be honest, I don't actually use the RC build - I like to
build the IDE from source myself. That way I can live on the bleeding edge - and use some of the
new features in the pipeline, such as the editorhints.

And speaking of NetBeans, there's going to be
a NetBeans Day this year
right next to JavaOne. Check out the speakers! Note also that the event is free, so you don't need to be registered
for JavaOne to attend.

Finally, check out this Microsoft blog
from somebody on Internet Explorer team. Despite some earlier public comments which indicated that
IE was focusing on browser features (like tabbed browsing) and not web standards compliance, Chris is saying
that the annoying PNG transparency bug has already been fixed, and that other important CSS bugs are also being addressed.
That's really great news. I'm speaking from direct experience here, having just spent two hours trying to get
something which was working on Firefox, Safari and Opera to work correctly on IE. That's for a hobby project
I'll blog about in the next couple of weeks - so stay tuned!!