[DrJava] Comments on the Beta

[Charles R. <creis@u.washington.edu>]

   I've been working with the beta release, and some of the new features 
are great.  Just thought I'd send back a few comments to help polish it 
up for the stable release...

  - The "JVM Args" option in the preferences is not at all descriptive 
about what it means.  The tool tip helps, but I bet most people don't 
look at that.  What about "JVM Args for Interactions"?

  - It looks like the beta release was not compiled with the "stable" 
Ant target (ie. the CodeStatus.DEVELOPMENT flag is true).  I don't know 
if there's anything new using that flag-- the only thing I know of is 
the "Anti-aliased text in Definitions" option, since we never figured 
out a reasonable default behavior for OS X, where the text is already 
anti-aliased.  I'll let you decide whether to include the feature in the 
stable release, but make sure DEVELOPMENT is false (using "ant 
commit-stable").

  - The status text for Find is now in the status bar, and it isn't 
legible if a long filename is open.  Not sure if there's an easy way to 
improve this.

  - The new buttons on the error panels are really useful.  I found an 
annoying quirk with the enable/disable behavior, though (which I lobbied 
strongly for in the first place).  If you click on an error, the buttons 
are properly enabled depending on whether you are at the start or end of 
the list.  But if you fix the error in the Definitions Pane and your 
caret happens to move to another line (eg. if the error was actually on 
the previous line), both error buttons are disabled!  This causes you to 
lose your place pretty quickly.  Not sure exactly what the right 
behavior is-- what about not changing the enabled state of the buttons 
unless you reach or leave one end of the list or recompile/test/etc? 
(That way you could always click next...)


That's it for now-- great work so far!

Charlie