Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

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Re: Screen shot of XENA running on the Mac?

Author:	Nicholas Riley
Posted:	5/24/1999; 3:56:26 PM
Topic:	Screen shot of XENA running on the Mac?
Msg #:	6642 (In response to 6637)
Prev/Next:	6641 / 6643

You're right, of course. I took that screenshot with a version of Xeena that was current in early May. It was "hard-wired" to use the Motif look and feel. The current versions attempt to use the platform-dependent Swing look and feel. And because the Mac look and feel isn't included in the standard swingall.jar, the program now refuses to even launch on the Mac unless you add the mac.jar containing the Mac PL&F.

As you may know, the problem here, like many others, is that Java is very Unix-centric in its design. When an alternative OS is considered, it is Windows. The Mac hardly enters the picture. That an OS might use a single menubar not directly associated with a window wasn't considered carefully in the design of JFC/Swing. In all "bundled" look and feel versions (Motif, Metal, Windows, "Mac") the menubar is within the window. Sun's attempt at a Mac look and feel is still very buggy and not very complete. There has been a third-party attempt to fix these bugs:

http://www.embria.com/macjava/

Among other things, it provides partial support for putting Swing menus in the Mac menu bar. I'm not sure of the status of rolling these changes into Sun's version. If it were made easier to just use the updated L&F with existing Swing apps, that would be a temporary solution.

--Nicholas

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