Cocoa is alive!
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 | |
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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. |
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| Improved Search TextField | |
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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. |
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| Shell Modifies State Indicator | |
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New API on Shell allows you to provide a hint to the user that the window is in a modified state |
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| Sheets | |
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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. |
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| DND feedback | |
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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. |
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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.
Posted June 11th, 2009 by Kevin Barnes in category: Cocoa
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4 Responses to “Cocoa is alive!”
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Prakash Says:
June 11th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Native toolbar + customizing it, is something I would love to see
I would be very happy if SWT supports Menu Bar flashing when a corresponding shortcut is used, nice checked tree implementation (as in Google Earth), adding a Dock Menu, Services Menu, … I’m greedy you see 
If you ever require a helping hand, let me know. I’ll be happy to help.
Lynn Gayowski Says:
June 11th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I can’t believe you didn’t kick off with “Cuckoo for Cocoa Ports” as the title.
Scott Says:
June 11th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Don’t forget the native DateTime control, and free spell checking in Text items.
Dominic Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 4:07 am
Well so far colour me impressed with the cocoa port. Thanks for all the hard work!