Sunday, January 18, 2015

Metal Look and Feel

To ensure cross-platform consistency, the Look and Feel (LAF) of the FBEditor has been restricted to the Java "Metal" CrossPlatformLookAndFeel. Accordingly, the "lookAndFeel" entry in the Preferences dialog has been removed. This has been checked in both Windows 8.1 with the Oracle Java 7 runtime, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the openjdk7 runtime. It has also been checked with the Java applets used in the FB Navigator in both Google Chrome on Windows 8.1 and Firefox with the icedTea plug-in on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Help menu updates

Web links to this blog and to the "About FBDK" information have been added to the FBEditor Help menu.

Improved fbdk2.jar

You may want to download the updated bootstrap file fbdk2.jar, available on the FBDK2 Home Page. File updates will then be shown in the bootstrap window as soon as they occur, before the main FBEditor window opens and partially covers the bootstrap window. This will help you to notice when files are updated; then you can consult this blog to see what changes (improvements?!) have occurred.

Continuous Improvement

With the 2.2 release, the FBDK has reached a fairly stable "continuous improvement" stage, where it keeps itself current by automatically downloading new features from the Web at startup. To avoid cluttering the FBDK Discussion Group, new features will henceforth be announced on this blog as they become available (you can also use this blog to comment on these features as they are announced).