the corner office

One might accept that toes are very useful things in the biological scheme of things, but they feel like a net loss to me. No sooner do I reach a state of good pedal well-being, than I stub yet another toe on something around the flat. I seem to spend my life perpetually limping. Bah.

I've never been a fan of Java's Metal look and feel. I use a few Java apps at work, and they look rather slick. This is because I use Windows at work. The Windows look and feel isn't too bad. I'm learning that the same doesn't apply to Linux.

On Linux systems, you have two non-Metal LAFs to choose from: GTK+ and Motif. Motif is the GUI granddaddy. Motif is old skool. It has that Unixey feel to it, but using it as a GUI theme circa 2007? Just not happening.

The alternative is the GTK+ LAF. It's not bulletproof. I tried it out with a JDesktopPane, and the JInternalFrames are totally broken. The internal window title bar gets hard-positioned at the bottom of the page, nowhere near the actual window, and the min/max icons are far too small. All in all, unusable for an MDI app.

As for Matisse4MyEclipse, some more likes and dislikes:

• positioning items using Matisse is a lot easier than coding up a layout. As you position items in the form, Matisse gives you guidelines suggesting optimal spacing. Nice and easy.
• the Visual Studio-like property browser for GUI components is nifty. Again, a helluva lot easier to scan through a list of properties and tweak something, compared to having to dig around in API documentation and hard-code the setting.
• did I mention that I really don't like Metal? Even with swing.properties being set, I still get the Metal theme when using Matisse4MyEclipse in Eclipse. I haven't dug around too much, but even if I do get it fixed, it's a schlep.
• speaking of which, I learned that the Java 6-related warnings I get when opening form editors, do matter on Windows. On Windows, I can't open context menus at all. Works fine on Linux though.
• it's possible to open multiple instances of a Matisse properties window/dialog. Every time you click on the source ('...') button, the dialog opens again. They should either be properly modal or even better, just revert focus whenever re-selected.

On a related note, Swing doesn't have a date picker either. There are a number of free components you can use, but it's not the same. Even SWT has one now, even if it's not the greatest. I know the argument is often that there's no way to have consistent date selection controls across all platforms, let alone one, but even a Java-specific one that looks good and works well would be better than nothing.

Isn't it a bit unfair that the incumbent PM gets to decide when to hold a general election? Ahead in the opinion polls? Call an election! I wonder whether the electorate ever stops to wonder whether the government being in a hurry to hold an election means they know something that everyone else doesn't.

Not that it matters to me, really. To this pleb, the Tories and Labour don't differ that much. I think it's a sign of a mature democracy: the main parties have some rhetorical differences to capitalise on historical loyalties, but they're all essentially centrists, and everyone's happy with that. Basically one crowd gets to be 'it' for a while, and the other lot hang around and moan a lot, to keep the first lot honest. Then when the public gets tired of the incumbents or if they screw up really badly, then they get hoofed and the other side gets to be 'it' for a while, and the process repeats.

It's supposed to be bad etiquette or something and you're not supposed to blog about how you haven't blogged in ages. But if I didn't blog about not blogging then I wouldn't even be blogging this. The real world combined with the usual October-is-looming assignment rush is keeping me busy.

Do you think that in 10 years' time we'll look back and be embarassed about how we used blogging as a verb?

I think Monday can be taken to be the end of summer. Until now temperatures have been fairly mild, but then Monday arrived. I popped downstairs to take out the rubbish and recycling, and realised that outdoors and shorts and t-shirts are no longer an option.

The thing is, I'm quite looking forward to winter. The winter/summer sunrise/sunset variation in South Africa is about 2 hours, so last year when we arrived in the UK, the whole sunset at 3PM business really threw me. I was ready for bed every night by suppertime. I got used to it though, and it was an equally odd adjustment when the sun took to setting after 10 in the evening. Got used to that pretty quickly too! Now that it's getting darker earlier again, I'm looking forward to living in perpetual gloom for a few months. In a few years' time I might whinge just like the locals, but for now the seasons are real seasons, and they don't fsck around. That's pretty cool.

This week's been a bit busy, but I finally got to sit down and tinker with Matisse4MyEclipse for a bit. Just briefly, a bit of Good, Bad and Ugly.

• The ugly: well, jarring is perhaps a fairer statement. While it's integrated into Eclipse, and the Matisse perspective and views work just like a normal Eclipse plug-in, and while there are some SWT-based components, Matisse is a Swing-based application, with lots of Swing-looking menus and controls.

• The bad: not much really, but there are some rough edges. I'm running Java 6 now, and when I open a form I get prompted with a warning that Java 6 isn't fully supported by Matisse4MyEclipse. This happens every time I open a form, which is a bit much. Having said that, I haven't encountered any Java 6 issues yet. Another odd thing is that you can open multiple instances of the same form. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature.

• The good: this is a helluva lot quicker and easier than hand-coding a UI. I haven't done anything fancy yet, and I haven't taken much time to peek into the internals, but so far, I like it.

After my last blog post about Eclipse RCP development, which included me commenting that MyEclipse offers Matisse for Pro subscribers, I got an email from Jens Eckels, marketing director of Genuitec, the company behind MyEclipse, offering to upgrade my license if I was willing to try Matisse4MyEclipse and blog about my experiences, good or bad.

I wasn't sure whether to accept the offer at first, because I was pretty much set on using SWT and JFace, but it didn't take me long to decide that it would be pretty silly to look a gift Matisse in the mouth, so to speak. What I really want is an easy way to whip up GUIs in Java, and Matisse is supposed to be the best way to do that. So in the next day or two, once I've had a chance to install it, I'll be giving Matisse a try and writing about what I think of it.

Thanks Jens!