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SWT Designer has got to be one of the best visual composition editors for designing GUIs using Eclipse’s SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit). Due to the relative young age of SWT, there aren’t that many tools that have been developed for this as opposed to if you develop GUIs using the standard Java’s AWT/Swing. Other tools which I’ve tried such as Eclipse’s Visual Editor project wasn’t that user friendly and pretty confusing to use (I probably will give it another shot again as I was hard pressed for time then :P) and didn’t support the new widgets our UI was going to have. Jigloo GUI Builder had the same issue of not having support for ‘ExpandBars’ and SWT GUI Builder doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2003.

IMHO SWT looks a lot better than Swing due to the way it retains the system’s look and feel instead of enforcing a standard (ugly) look over all platforms. It blends in nicely with other applications and doesn’t look out of place when being run with other applications.

However, it seems Microsoft is actually going away from that approach (or at least for some of their products for now). Their recent applications such as Windows Media Player 10/11, Windows Live Messenger have the option for the standard windowing to be hidden allowing the application to have menus, buttons, colour schemes that are totally disconnected from the underlying Windows’ theme.

So was Sun right after all in having a GUI which runs in its own shell without taking into consideration the native look and feel? Or is the reason because Sun’s Swing isn’t aesthetically pleasing? Although those applications by M$ looked fine on my Windows desktop, it probably would not have the same effect if it was run on a Mac OS X or Linux’s Gnome for example. Since Java applications are meant to be cross platform, I believe Eclipse’s SWT approach is the way to go.

      

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You probably would’ve come across sites like Youtube and Google Video, very likely from links sent by friends. If the thought of saving the clips ever crossed your mind, KeepVid is a site which can do it easily.

To play the saved FLV files, video players such as VLC media player or FLV Player would do the trick.

      

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Unfortunately FileZilla Server’s logging option did not allow a change to the target directory where the logs will be stored. So instead of changing any bits of the program code, I created a symbolic link using a program called Junction Link Magic which linked the default logs directory to another directory where I keep all my logfiles at. ;)

Here’s the link to an article on symbolic and hard links in Windows. :)

      

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Here’s a quick trick to boost the performance of your USB drive/stick which I came across while I was doing partitioning using Windows’ built in disk management tool (click on the thumbnail images to view the full sized screenshot):

1. Get to ‘My Computer’, right click on your USB device and click ‘Properties’.

2. In the dialog box that appears, click on the ‘Hardware’ tab, select your USB device and click ‘Properties’.

3. In the dialog box that appears, click on the ‘Policies’ tab, select ‘Optimize for performance’, and click the ‘OK’ button of the dialog boxes that have shown up.

The performance increase is very apparent if you’re using an external hard drive which is connected via USB (my 200GB external hard disk is still running fine :P) and probably even with USB flash drives if you’re doing a lot of data transfers.

The downside in changing this setting is that you would have to ensure that you have to explicitly invoke the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ option (the green icon in the system tray) before unplugging your USB device as opposed to being able to just unplug it and most likely not suffer any data corruption.

      

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The current beta release of the next release of Windows supposedly requires 7 steps to delete a shortcut. Have a look at the screenshots of it here. :P

Tom’s Hardware has done a pretty comprehensive review of the latest beta release which you can have a read here.

      

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Open Source Windows has a pretty neat list of free open-source software for Windows grouped into various categories. I would say it’s a good place to start for those who are searching for an open-source/free alternative to the software they are currently using as they have handpicked the cream of the crop for each category.

While on open-source, I came across this page which has a list of open-source games for Windows. Haven’t tried any of them though. ;)

      

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