Windows L&F

Glen Stampoultzis complains (rightfully) about the Windows XP look and feel. It fits in a lot better than his example makes out for our usage – not sure if that’s just because we never use JFileChooser (use java.awt.FileChooser instead, JFileChooser is awful in every L&F) or if it’s some particular setting somewhere. Anyway, if you’d like to pick up a whole bunch of fixes for the Windows L&F (both XP and non-XP), take a look at WinLaf. It provides some really nice fixes for the L&F on Windows and is very easy to integrate. Be warned though, it occurred a very heavy performance penalty in our application, though I still can’t say why exactly. We wound up removing it again because we just didn’t have time to fix it before release. If a few more people get behind it and particularly if someone hits it hard with a profiler it could be a very useful project. OS X users should check out QuaQua which is a similar kind of thing for OS X. I haven’t used QuaQua myself though.