The Planetarium

Most of you thought the Consumer JRE (aka Java SE 6u10) would exceed 70 million downloads in the first month of its consumer release, and the Planetarium will tell you who got it right this week, when all the data is gathered from the Java Update push (in fact of 6u11 = 6u10 + bug fixes) which started in the first week of December.

So its interesting to see commercial apps picking up on the new runtime and deployment features in the JRE. Like the PDF Viewer from BFO. You can see a video of it being dragged out of the web page here, but this blog entry outlines the other features it uses, like control over the heap size, and how to make the desktop shortcut to it.

Or just run it yourself here (Alt-Click to drag the applet out).

Its also a great example of the kind of 'traditional rectangular' GUI for which Swing excels.