magpiebrain

Two of the three bugs on my watch list have in recent days been makred for inclusion in Mustang (Java 6). RFE 4057701 entitled “Need way to find free disk space” has been in since virtually the year dot, and was originally dropped from the first NIO JSR:

Resolution of this request is considered a high priority for Mustang.
Active development on this feature has been in progress for the past
several months. I expect that we will complete this work within the
next couple of months. These methods will be in Mustang-beta.

I’m trying to work how how this feature required “several months” of development, but at least it’s a “high priority”. Lets gloss over the fact that even if I am programming in Java by the time Java 6 is out it’ll be another year or two before my clients will be using it.
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Less important, but still a “woho!” moment for me, is the inclusion of RFE 4726365 – “Java 2D to support LCD optimized anti-aliased text (sub-pixel resolution)”.

The quality of Java2D text antialiasing leaves a lot to be
desired in comparison to OS naitve antialiasing, especially
ClearType on Windows.

Java2D uses gray scale antialiasing. At point sizes below a
certain threshold (around 14pt it seems) this just does not
look very good, with text appearing ‘lumpy’ and uneven.
Either the way antialiasing interacts with font hinting
needs to be improved, or there should be a settable
rendering hint so that text below a certain size is not
antialiased. In Windows standard text antialiasing, this
works well. Larger font sizes are antialiased, where the
most benefit is seen, and smaller font sizes are untouched,
making them legible.

Decent anti-aliasing is one of the key features in making Java UI’s fit in better with native applications, and the fact that the UI will pick this up automatically should mean existing applications will look better for free, at least where LCD’s are concerned. Now I hope someone looks at RFE 4109888…