[DrJava] Mac OS X Hardware Acceleration

[Peter C. <cen...@ri...>]

To those of you who use DrJava on Mac OS X, it may help to 
enable hardware acceleration.  I've noticed an improvement in 
scrolling performance on my 500 MHz iBook.  There are two 
methods of enabling acceleration, depending on whether you have 
the latest 1.3.1 update from Apple or not.  I won't bother 
explaining the old way, since you should all get the new version 
anyway.  The new method is described here:

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/java/ReleaseNotes/java131update1/NewFeatures/
index.html

Sadly, the heuristic used to determine if acceleration should be 
enabled apparently doesn't show enough of a performance increase 
to actually use it on my iBook.  I know that several of you have 
this machine also, so here's the workaround.  Use the special 
debug keys to force hardware acceleration on each time you run 
DrJava.  This is the key that needs to be added to your 
Info.plist or MRJApp.properties file.  Once this is on, use 
Command-F8 while running DrJava to force your machine to run 
Swing a bit less painfully:

com.apple.usedebugkeys=true

Sadly, this doesn't appear to fix the horrendous slowness in 
actual editing, but I'll be working on that later tonight.

--
Peter