With Eclipse Summit Europe, and 3.6 M3 shipping, this is a big week in the Eclipse and SWT worlds. The SWT team is still working hard for you. We have over 80 fixes and enhancements in the milestone. We’re running on nearly 20 platforms. We have new contributors who are dangerously close to becoming committers. We’re pretty busy, but we’re sometimes guilty of not telling everyone what we’ve been doing. Maybe we can change that.

As of Friday, there’s new bot that update Twitter every time an SWT bug is closed. Follow SWTFixes on Twitter to get these updates.

Also there’s a new SWT Fan Page on Facebook. Sign up now to become one of the first fans of SWT!

Of course there’s the news group, mail list, #eclipse IRC channel still, and you can follow me on Twitter. (occasionally I might even have something interesting to say) still.

Looks like we’re going to get 64 bit cocoa EPP packages for Galileo SR1, but the EPP guys need help testing. Please download the latest build and report any problems you have in bug 281501.

Building the native libraries for SWT has always been a somewhat manual task. Every few months a new sucker committer is picked, and that person has the responsibility of building all of the SWT native libraries for each build. Over the years, this process has increasingly cumbersome as we have added support for more and more platforms. Our current list of platforms looks like this:

Windows - win32 - x86, x86_64, WinCE, and ia64 Windows - WPF Mac - Carbon Mac - Cocoa - x86 and x86_64 Linux - GTK - x86, x86_64, and PPC Linux - Motif - x86 Solaris - GTK -x86 and sparc Solaris - Motif AIX - Motif HPUX - Motif Photon

There’s good news on this front though. With much hard work Bogdan Gheorghe, Felipe Heidrich, and Silenio Quarti have almost entirely automated the process using Hudson. Now when a build is necessary it can be done with a single click!
Great work guys! Looking forward to lots of sunny skies!

A message from Felipe Heidrich, everyone’s second favorite SWT committer:

SWT Tools users rejoice! The plugin will from now on be distributed from a p2 update site. Point your p2 at one of these sites: SWT Tools Update Sites. You’ll get a fast easy install of the JNI generators, the UI Spy and Sleak. No longer will you have to check out, build, export, the code yourself!

Go get it!
Then send us patches

NOTE: For developing against HEAD please use the 3.6 updates. The 3.5 update site is there for development of the 3.5.x stream.

Finally Eclipse 3.5 is about to ship and with it, Mac users are getting a complete Cocoa port of the SWT. With this blog post I’m going to highlight some of the new features that the Cocoa port is bringing to Mac users.

I hope none of this is news to any Mac users in the Eclipse community since I stole these items from the SWT New and Noteworthy pages. Nice to have them all summarized in one place though.

64 bit Support
First and foremost, Cocoa is available in 32 and 64 bit. This is important to anyone that has wanted to use SWT with Apple’s 64 bit Java 6 VM, but couldn’t because Carbon was only 32 bit.
Improved Search TextField
The SWT.SEARCH style gives you Mac style search text fields. You can customize the widget with the SWT.ICON_SEARCH and SWT.ICON_CANCEL constants to give you the look and functionality that you need for you application.
Shell Modifies State Indicator
New API on Shell allows you to provide a hint to the user that the window is in a modified state
Sheets
Sheet windows are supported by the SWT Cocoa port. These windows animate down from the title bar when they are opened and they go a way in improving the look and feel of you application on Mac.
DND feedback
Cocoa drag and drop in trees and tables is fully supported. Aside from the visual feedback, native features such as automatic collapse of tree items is supported when the drag.

More to come!

Stay tuned, there’s more to come in 3.6. Some possibilities include a the Mac unified toolbar, badge labels on dock icons, and maybe even multi touch support! File bugs for anything that you think we’re missing.