Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Tuesday March 29, 2005

A brief experience with SWT

Okay, so one of the reasons I've not blogged a whole lot lately is that I've not been reading blogs very much lately. Mostly that was due to a large workload, but it was also because I'd never really settled on an RSS/Atom newsreader.

So I poked at the search engine with "java RSS newsreader atom" and it came back with RSSOwl. Hmmm.... This is weird-- it's written in Java and has different packaging for different platforms. Ah well-- let's grab the Solaris one. One quick download later, I fire it up and.... man is this thing ugly. It's using the Motif look and feel. Why did they code that in as the default. No big deal. I need to modify the startup script it came with to use Tiger anyway.

vi the run.sh, add in -Dswing.defaultlaf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel, set the path to Tiger and run it. It still looks horrid. What's with this?

Well, you've probably figured it out from the title. It was written with SWT, so the "Solaris" version they distribute is really "Solaris SPARC using Motif". Had I tried to download the same Solaris build on my laptop, it would have, of course, failed.

Besides that, Sun's been shipping Gnome since Solaris 9! C'mon guys, if you're going to decide to code for each platform specifically (which you've done as soon as you decided on SWT), at least make good use of what the platform gives you.

Ah well, I could hack with the source, or I can go find another newsreader. I'll go for the latter....