Swing
ToolbarBuilder – Use the builder pattern to create toolbars
Recently I discovered Jeremys uber-ButtonUI’s. He provides UI classes to mimic Mac OS Button looks (and more) including segmented Buttons. The UI’s are nice, but while playing around with, I thought a builder approach would fit to easily create toolbars of buttons and components. Basically the problem is that segmentation configuration depends on Button order ( 
), so changing the order of elements within a toolbar now also involves updating the segmentation configuration. Jeremy provides a nice installUI method that helps adding the appropriate button UIs, but I thought this could be improved further and I wanted to play with the builder pattern and find a way to make it extensible without copy/pasting the whole builder.
Appframework and accelerator keys
Today I re-researched on the topic of assigning accelerator keys to actions depending on the operating system using java appframework. The problem I have is simple. On Mac OS X the “meta” key maps to apples command key. On windows it maps to the “Alt” key. And thats is the beginning of all the trouble. Assume you want to define a “save” action. On Mac the shortcut should be “command-S”, on windows it should be “ctrl-S”. In terms of appframework (or java keystrokes) that means you need:
save.Action.accelerator=meta pressed Sif you are on Mac OS X and
save.Action.accelerator=ctrl pressed Sif you are on Windows. The simple way to to this is
save.Action.accelerator=shortcut Sand “shortcut” will map to the meta key on the mac and to the ctrl key on windows. Remember, this is appframework specific and not a real Keystroke definition. I didn’t find the documentation anywhere ( I am sure it somewhere 
), but I found that while browsing the source code. It doesn’t solve all the problems related to accelerator/mnemonic/keystrokes on differen paltforms ! But, at least for me, it solved 90% of the problems, because we develope our app in english (so no other locales involved) and “ctrl” is also fine for the linux/unix/solaris platform. I you want to do more or just want to read more about the problem, there is a thread from the appframwork mailing list.