devdaily.com

If you don't do anything to your Java application on a Mac OS X system, your Java class name will appear in the Mac menubar. Of course, this isn't a good thing. There are a couple of things you can do to get the name of your Java application on the Mac menu bar, and I'll share all of the ways I know how to do this. I've listed these techniques in order here from "easiest" to "best".

I was talking to a friend the other day about what I learned in college, and I think I learned a couple of things.

First, I learned how to study, learn, and take tests. You really do learn a fair amount about how you, as an individual learn. Some people learn things very naturally, and others, like me, have to go to other lengths to get things into our brains. So without going into more detail on this topic, I learned how to learn.

Java Refactoring FAQ: Can you provide an example of the Extract Interface refactoring process?

While working on a Java Swing development project recently, I had written a couple of controllers (as in controllers from the Model/View/Controller pattern), and I was about to write some more, when I realized that if I refactored my Java source code I would have a much better design -- source code I code more easily maintain.

The pattern I saw repeated in my Java controller classes was that they all had similar method names, something like this:

I took a little time today to add some new features to my "JustWrite" text editor, and one of the features I'm experimenting with is an animation similar to the current horizontal scrolling area shown at the top of Apple's Mac web page. When you first hit that page the scrolling area is offset a little bit, and then in an animation the scrollbar moves more to the center of the scrolling display area.

I just read a couple of emails about the concepts of a Java stack and heap, and thinking that their descriptions weren't exactly right, I decided to do a little research. There's no better source than the source, so directly from Sun's Java website, here are definitions for the Java stack and Java heap.

Java stack definition

Here's the definition of a Java stack, with a few pieces removed for clarity:

The Chain of Responsibility Pattern is a design pattern whose intent is to avoid coupling the sender of a request to its receivers by giving more than one object a chance to handle a request. The Chain of Responsibility works like this:

If you don't own a copy of Martin Fowler's Refactoring book, I highly recommend it. The basic idea of refactoring source code is that the code "smells" in one way or another, and there are a variety of ways to improve smelly code. More specifically, Mr. Fowler describes refactoring as this:

Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, yet improves its internal structure.

A few weeks ago when I upgraded my iPhone 3G to iOS 4, I hooked up my iPhone to my old Windows computer, where it was originally sync'd. Downloading my iPhone photos onto my Windows XP computer was a pain, and worse than that, in the process, the iPhone photos were pulled off the phone in some random order, so all the photos are completely out of order when I look at them in the Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder.

Just some quick note here today as I dig into the Java 5 concurrency classes and utilities. Mostly, I just wanted to save a few good links I've found related to Java concurrency and multi-core programming:

With several media outlets reporting that Steve Jobs told someone by email yesterday that an iPhone 3G iOS4 software update was "coming soon", I thought I'd share my latest iPhone 3G iOS4 performance problems of the last 24 hours: