After reading up on how you can use SWT to give Java a more native look and feel I was interested in giving it a shot first hand. I decided to break out old faithful (Hash Verifier) and re-write it completely in Java/SWT. The end result was an application that has essentially equivalent functionality (see below for differences) but is completely cross-platform. No matter what operating system you end up running this on (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux) it should have a native look and feel.

After a little bit of pressure from the people responding to my previous post (My search for the best KDE Linux distribution), I have finally given in and tried out Chakra. The Chakra Project starts with Arch Linux as a base but, instead of forcing you to build your own distro piece of piece, Chakra comes more or less pre-packaged. Installation The installation was one of the best I’ve ever seen.

It’s no secret that while Java possess probably the most widely distributed, cross-platform, and common user interface libraries, graphical Java applications on the whole simply stand out for the wrong reasons. Whether the GUI comes in the form of the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) or Swing, each can be far from pretty and often do not mesh well with the platform they are being run on. For instance, running an AWT or Swing application can be an almost alien experience, no matter what operating system you are using, because neither uses the native control widgets.

Java is an excellent programming language but too often the JVM seems to slow it down. Yes I know that there have been tremendous speed improvements in recent versions but the fact remains that it can still feel slow. It also tends to use an insane amount of memory to do just about anything (the heap is cheap is the name of the game!). Well thankfully there are ways you can tighten the JVM’s belt and even fine tune its garbage collection process.

Recently I have been messing around with the Glade interface designer, a rapid application development tool that allows you to create full GTK+ user interfaces very easily. The neat thing about this tool is that it saves the GUI as an XML document, which is then hooked into your code through various language specific ‘sketchers’. These sketchers read in the XML and generate the corresponding ‘native’ code interfaces – often at runtime.

There has been far too much iPhone related news lately but I feel as though I should at least weigh in with my thoughts on the new iPhone OS. I have been running [iOS 4][1] on my [iPhone 3GS][2] since it was officially released about a week ago. Rather than write a lengthy review I figured I would simply add my short comments about the major new features. This should, hopefully, result in a very quick and informative review.

When Ubuntu 10.04 was released it represented the most modern incarnation of Canonical’s premier Linux desktop distribution. However not all things were better in this release. For myself I immediately noticed a problem while trying to install the gnustep-devel development libraries for GNUstep and Objective-C. I was greeted with this oh so lovely error message: Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.

For my iPhone Application Programming course I have become quite accustomed to using Objective-C; mostly because Apple strongly recommends requires that you write all of your code in it. Let me just begin by saying that Objective-C can be one of the most confusing and, at least at first glance, poorly designed programming languages that I have come across. Rather than using the standard C-like syntax of instance.method Objective-C uses a message passing syntax which looks a little something like [instance method].

Canada still imposes restrictions on encryption. Who knew? Today I happen to read something that Michael Geist had written about Canada’s state of encryption laws and I was floored. In it he referenced this article which discussed the Government of Canada’s new public consultation on encryption laws. From the article: Encryption controls have been a challenge for many Canadian software and hardware vendors. Category 5 — Part 2 of Canada’s Export Control List identifies information security items that require a permit in order to be exported from Canada to destinations other than the United States.

As some of you already know, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop environment (or KDE Workspaces or whatever they’re calling it these days). In my search to reach Linux KDE perfection I have tested out a number of different distributions. First there was Fedora, which I happily ran throughout the length of the experiment. Once that was finished I attempted to install and try both Kubuntu and openSUSE.