Google Chrome

By the time I wrote this post (4 p.m local time), Google Chrome is already a day old, an old news considering the breakneck speed in which information was exchanged nowadays. It begins with a comic floating in my mailbox yesterday. The comic depicted the technical concept behind Chrome which naturally makes the techies stuff a lot easier to comprehend. I read the comic and actually excited about it. Imagine my surprise when I arrive at the office this morning, to know that the blogosphere is already fumed with the release of Google Chrome beta. Word is, that the arrival of ultra-secret-project that is Google Browser a.k.a Google Chrome has push the ante of web-browser a notch more. The V8 JavaScript VM was reportedly up to 10-times faster than Firefox or Safari and FIFTY SIX-times faster than IE7 (Source: www.wired.com) It is interesting to see how Redmond is going to respond with their IE8 (another "me too"? InPrivate mode? sorry, not interested)

However, as the beta version is only available for Windows (considering that Google aimed to dampen the largest market share first, quite a bold move, if you asked me), I can't get my hands on it just yet and therefore I could only take the news of a blazing fast, clean and minimal design new player in the browser war at the face value. It doesn't make me less excited though.

Java gets Mentioned in Dilbert

JInternalFrame title background color

I decided to add new labels for this blog, conveniently named "Tech". Posts under this label would serve as my documentations, my bread-crumbs would've been a more proper name which i had left on my ventures to the depth and dark cave called Software Engineering. I would've logged all interesting facts (by interesting means, facts that piqued my interests, obviously), new experiences, and most of all, stupid mistakes which i have stumbled upon during the process.

This morning, i had spent a good part of my morning coffee trying to figured out how to put a custom color to my JInternalFrame title background. My client wanted to put a red color to indicate the frame associated with "Buy" business process and blue color to indicate the frame associated with "Sell". By default, i had wrote this code:

UIManager.put("InternalFrame.activeTitleBackground", new ColorUIResource(Color.RED));
UIManager.put("InternalFrame.activeTitleForeground", new ColorUIResource(Color.WHITE));
UIManager.put("InternalFrame.titleFont", new Font("Dialog", Font.PLAIN, 11));
updateUI();

The code compiled fine and should have been worked fine. I had tested it using different component on the same frame, and they worked like a charm. However, in this JInternalFrame case, the only thing that worked was the titleFont which changed to small script quite different from the defaults. The color, was the same light blue as common to Metal Look and Feel - which i loved the most, by the way.

After mulling for about a couple of hours googling here and there, i found an explanation to this 'bug' here. Based on that article, i should able to overcome this problem if i used Windows Look and Feel. So, i added these lines of code prior to the lines above, and tested it:

try {
UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());
}
catch (Exception e) {
UIManager.setLookAndFeel("javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel");
}

When i executed it, i had this result:


which doesn't actually satisfy my needs. But something was right. The title foreground color was exactly what i had wanted. White. It led me to a simple conclusion, i changed my window theme to windows XP's Silver to Window Classic's and voila.


The color was exactly what i had wanted. But, my homework still remains that i had to be able to enforced the color i wanted regardless of the theme on the client's Operating System that runs my application.