#297 Use AWT file chooser under OS X

[Dan Smith]

According to this article:

<http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2004/01/29/swing.html>

The AWT file chooser looks much better under OS X than the Swing
version. If that's true, it would be nice to use it instead (refactoring the
file chooser creation logic into the platform-specific code). The Swing
version is quite annoying, when compared to the native OS X dialog.

[scottspe]

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I agree with this. The AWT file chooser IS better for OS X than that provided by
Swing.

[Peter Centgraf]

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This was considered a long time ago, and the decision was
made to stay with Swing. AWT dialogs AFAIK cannot provide
multi-select behavior. At the time, we thought that
multi-select support trumped everything else.

I sympathize with the request, and I agree that the standard
Apple JFileChooser is awful. The best current workaround is
to use the Quaqua look-and-feel, which provides a much more
Mac-like JFileChooser implementation. I had this working at
some point a long time ago, but the code is bit-rotten. I
think I needed to change the way that the look-and-feel
preference was used at startup to make it work. I'm sure
the team would appreciate an up-to-date patch, if anyone
would like to investigate this again. :-)

[Dan Smith]

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Quaqua sounds like a very promising option. I tried to
find something like that myself, and didn't have any
luck. Here's the URL:

<http://www.randelshofer.ch/quaqua/download.html>

For comparison, this page has some screen shots of
Apple's built-in Java dialogs:

<https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Java/
Conceptual/Java131Development/x_platform/
chapter_5_section_4.html>

The document is somewhat out-of-date, but the Swing
screen shot is fairly accurate, so I imagine the AWT one
is, too. The page also has some general information on
OS X/Swing GUI issues (as of 1.3, anyway).