I love both Eclipse and Mac, but the combination of these two some how comes out with glitches. Although UI components are native, there are several things a Mac user will be missing in Eclipse to have the native experience. Installer shipped as .dmg or the application in a single .app file or lack of Sheet support in SWT - just to name a few.
But on the other side, SWT provides support for native search fields with the SWT.SEARCH and SWT.CANCEL. The workbench already uses these flags in many places, but not in the FilteredItemsSelectionDialog. So If you use the Open Resource or Open Type or any other derived dialogs, you would get something like:
Had our workbench used the sytle bits, it would look like:
Adding the SWT style bits to the text field doesn't make any difference on other OS, but it does adds a little difference in Macs. So next time you are coding for a search field, do remember to add these style bits and make your Mac users happy.
Note 1: Whenever someone reads a complaining post like this one, the first comment would be "did you raise a bug?". So before anyone comments, yes, I did raise a bug and submit a patch. Its accepted and should be available in M1 of 3.5. Yeah, you read it right. I'm blogging about Eclipse 3.5. See Ganymede is yet to hit the download servers, but its already history now :-)
Note 2: My bug was not the first resolved bug for 3.5, but certainly this blog post will be the first on 3.5 :-)
Note 3: What is the official name for 3.5 release train? I tried to make a guess, but couldn't. Anyone?
Jun 22, 2008
Honoring Macs with SWT.SEARCH style bit
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3 comments:
Haha. This is one of the things I really LOVE about Eclipse. Even simple improvements can be waiting a year to be released. And critical fixes - at least for Mac - is still not a valid reason to push out an extraordinary release.
But still I like it better than than the other releases.
See http://www.eclipse.org/swt/macosx/
(which has been there forever)
Yup, I'm aware of that, but Eclipse is no shipped that way right?
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