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20050825 Thursday August 25, 2005

Options, Options, We Want Options!

Remember this...

Well, forget about it. Here's a short tour through a whole new world (click to enlarge each screenshot):

General panel

Editor panel

Fonts & Colors panel

Keymap panel

Advanced panel

I spotted one spelling mistake in the screenshots above... can anyone else see it?

Hmmm... I see Roman also blogged about this. Is more proof necessary that this is a truly awesome step forward for NetBeans?

Aug 25 2005, 01:44:01 AM PDT Permalink

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/entry/options_options_we_want_options
Comments:

spelling mistake in:
Fonts and Colors | highlihgting 
                         ^ 
                   highlighting

Posted by pprun on August 25, 2005 at 03:23 AM PDT #

The new options panels are a massive improvement over the old options panel. The new layout feels so natural and is very easy to navigate.

Posted by Daniel Sheppard on August 25, 2005 at 08:49 AM PDT #

On the General panel it reads "Flattern packages". This should probably be written as "Flatten packages".

Posted by giorgio42 on August 25, 2005 at 01:16 PM PDT #

So, did you guys hire the firefox preferences UI team? Looks really good and is definitely a huge step forward for NetBeans. However, I gotta admit, I have seen those screens before--whenever I need to adjust something in firefox.

Posted by Chris Johnston on August 25, 2005 at 08:09 PM PDT #

Thanks for the responses! The spelling mistake that pprun found is the one that I meant -- "flattern" is something that surprised me too, but it seems to have some precedent (I've googled a bit, and apart from a lot of German, I found "flattern used both as an adjective and as a verb). Daniel, I agree with you, I think so too -- much easier and a whole different look-and-feel to what I'm used to in NetBeans. Chris, I don't know its origin, but if FireFox is using it too, then it can only be a good thing!

Posted by Geertjan on August 26, 2005 at 03:11 AM PDT #

When I tested this out with a qbuild, a co-worker, who only works with IDEA standing behind me, said: "He, they've stolen from IDEA, even the icons ..." Laughter, but we started a comparison and yeah, on the first view it looks nearly the same... :( I think I've to switch to an other IDE. Yes, I love all the cool features, but each build is shooting NB more and more closer to IDEA (behaviour, look, features, nearly everything, except the build-system) and I do not like IDEA.

Posted by boogey on August 26, 2005 at 07:50 AM PDT #

Hey boogey, but you've got to admit that this Options window is waaaay better than the 4.1 Options window, right? In terms of manageability and seeing where everything's at, this is just so cool. The other thing is -- from what I've been told (not having used it myself), IDEA is a great IDE -- very high quality refactoring etc. etc. etc. -- but not free. While NetBeans is not only free (no strings attached), but has <u>heaps</u> of cutting-edge modules that are all part of the IDE straight out-of-the-box. I mean, as soon as you've installed it, you've got such a broad level of development opportunities available to you -- from J2SE to web to J2EE to J2ME -- it's almost overwhelming. On top of that there's this amazing user community -- I mean, believe me on this point: people who work at Sun for NetBeans take user feedback very seriously. And it's such a lively community, so much opportunity for input and participation, that -- again -- it's really pretty amazing. I've worked for a number of software companies before this (at least 5, all of them as technical writer) and I have <u>never</u> been excited enough about a product to spend time blogging about it on a daily basis (even assuming that my previous employers would have let me blog every day, since none of them had an official blogging policy whereby blogging is not only permitted but encouraged). I could go on -- but I'm researching some very interesting stuff on web service security that I want to get back to. (By the way, if someone had said 'web service security' to me 3 years ago, I would've yawned, but now -- because of the space I've been given to explore pretty much whatever I want -- I <u>want</u> to find out more -- and at least partly because I'm able to share my discoveries with a user community that's really interested (and interesting)). So, anyway, NetBeans -- not just the product, but the community itself -- really rocks.

Posted by Geertjan on August 26, 2005 at 08:12 AM PDT #

Hey geertjan, I like netbeans, no I LOVE it. In my team I'm the only one using it (I don't know, but I think the first version I used was 3.3 or sth. around that) And I'm going to stick on it. :) You are right, the new Options are much better to use, than the old ones, even after years of using them, it always took long minutes to find the right place. :) Yes, I love this IDE. :))

Posted by boogey on August 26, 2005 at 08:20 AM PDT #

Great! I wait the improvement of NetBeans's options for a long time - the duplicated Options-Options-Options title; the stiff left panel tabluar property tree; the hard to understand "user"/"Default" swither... Now, every thing changed. Congratulations!

Posted by Wayne on August 29, 2005 at 12:11 AM PDT #

Yes -- and the screenshots I showed in this blog entry aren't even complete -- more things are being added as we speak. For example, the Advanced panel now contains a 3rd section (in addition to 'Form Editor' and 'Internationalization'): 'Ant'. It's looking really really good.

Posted by Geertjan on August 29, 2005 at 12:18 AM PDT #

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