Things are going well on my little porting project of PasswordSafe to SWT. Here are some grabs of the screenshots so far running on Linux: As a point of comparison, here’s the original Win32 application that I’ve been trying to clone: First time I ran it on Linux, I found that the SWT Dialog object was completely blank. Turns out I wasn’t calling shell.layout() before calling shell.open(). Seems that the Win32 version is more forgiving. [...]

Time to brag about two companies that I’ve been dealing with lately that have offered me exceptional support. The first great experience was from the guys at DbVisualizer (one very cool database query tool with an astoundingly good Swing interface). For $99, this tools is really great value, and well worth the dollars. What has surprised me is that, even at the lower end of the $ spectrum, the support has also been absolutely outstanding. [...]

Like many of you, I spend the vast majority of my time working on backend code. Hacking infrastructure libraries, EJBs, web framework code and all the unit tests that live along side them. One thing I don’t have, and have never really had, is any real sense of GUI design. Even in my VB days, I was the king of the FrankenGUI. But since getting so pumped about SWT (after reading the excellent The Definitive [...]

So you’ve got yourself a snazzy .ico file that you’d like to use in your funky new SWT app. Next step is to find an app that lets you convert .ico files to .gif files (or .png or whatever) that will play with SWT. To save you some time, if you’re a Windows user, let me point you to the freeware IrfanView which will let you batch convert a whole directory of ico files to [...]

If you develop SWT apps, or you wish you good develop non-sucking Java GUIs, then you *have* to have a look at SWT Designer. This Eclipse plug-in is so good I just want to rave. Some of the things I just want to rave about are: There are no magic “untouchable” sections of your codebase (ala my early JBuilder experiences where you had all these //DO NOT EDIT sections) Refactoring all still works – in [...]