Developing Java applications for the desktop has changed over the last few years, java is really fast now and desktop gurus like Joshua Marinacci, Romain Guy, Chet Haase and Kirill Grouchnikov have shown us that those applications can look great and integrate well with their OS Environment. Projects like jdic complement the desktop integration parts core java is missing, but recently I discovered one very basic thing that is missing so far: Global Hotkey support. I wanted to write a little application that hides in the background until I hit a simple keyboard shortcut like Quicksilver does on the mac. Keyboard shortcuts can really make your life easier and a global shortcut can make the difference whether your application is used or not. I want a tool that simplifies taking notes while I surf the web ( do you still say “to surf the web?” ) and adding them to my inbox (GTD). There seems to be a project that does it for windows ( JIntellyType) and some hints how to implement such functionality for kde, but nothing generic. I think that would really be a great addition to JDIC, and they obviously have thought about it already, and it seems the AB5K / Desklet team is also looking for help on this topic. Any JNI Experts out there to help?
Archiv für Dezember 2007
Hotkeys in Java
Samstag, 29. Dezember 2007Importing blog-city entries
Mittwoch, 26. Dezember 2007If you’re thinking about moving from blog-city to your own blog, make sure you plan to spend an afternoon or two moving your blog entries! I tried to export everything as rss feed (the only option I had for my free account) just to find out that wordpress can’t really interpret these exports. Entries are imported with date and tags, but most of them show no content.
When editing these partial imports I found out that the actual content sits in a cdata tag. When you remove that and some characters that wordpress can’t interpret the entries are there. That can be a lot of work, and it get’s worse since I have a lot of formatted code in my blog entries. Formatting is totally lost.
The only way I found to do it is replace the content by copy / paste from the blog-city editor. This way I get the date, title and tags imported and the formatting is kept.
Oh, and one hint for beginning bloggers: Don’t interlink your blog entries, unless you’re sure you’ll never have to move them 
Hello again!
Mittwoch, 26. Dezember 2007Blogging at blog-city was nice, but there were many limitations so I decided to set up this site and give wordpress a try. I also decided to host the web site of the NetBeans Usergroup here, since the visibility at the old site in the wiki is not very good. Seems Google isn’t allowed to search the site, which is not very helpful when you’re trying to attract many developers to come to meetings . So, welcome to this new blog. I hope you enjoy it. I hope moving the content of the old blog isn’t too hard, since the old blog is going to be unavailable from January, 1st 2008.
Apple releases Developer preview of Java 6
Mittwoch, 19. Dezember 2007Good news everyone: There’s an official developer preview of Java 6 for the mac . I doubt that Gosling will switch back to using a mac notebook due to this, but I’m quite sure that a lot of those NetBeans users, who bought that shiny new mac notebook last year are relieved.
It’s also good to know that there is Landon Fuller’s SoyLatte, that quickly provided a workaround. SoyLatte is planning to provide a current version of Java 7 to be released together with SUN’s release, so the release of the next version of java might be a bit less painful for mac users .
iReport for NetBeans 6.0
Mittwoch, 19. Dezember 2007Last week at JavaPolis in Antwerp JasperSoft has announced an iReport plugin for NetBeans 6.0. The plugin will be fully integrated into the NetBeans IDE and provide many features for building, testing and running Reports. The new report designer is planned to be released in February 2008. A preview is already available from the iReports download site at Jasperforge.
NetBeans Event in Munich
Dienstag, 18. Dezember 2007Are you a NetBeans user in or near Munich? Get out your calendar and make sure you don’t miss this: NetBeans dreamteam member and SUN Java Champion Adam Bien is giving a talk on “Lightweight Java EE 5/6 architectures with EJB 3.X, JPA 1,X and JSF”. The event is on 01/24/2008, 6 pm @ Genomatix Software GmbH, Bayerstr. 85a. It’s free and open ended. Be prepared for updates, since we’ll probably have an additional NetBeans talk that evening. Details and news on this event are available from the Munich NetBeans Usergroup homepage.