After attending the Austin Java Users Group (AJUG) this last Tuesday at Sun Microsystems office in Austin I decided to give NetBeans another look. I have been using eclipse for some time, even during my three year contract at Sun. I had used Forte for a few months back at the beginning of the contract but gladly switched back to eclipse mainly for refactoring support. Now they promise NetBeans is better than ever. Well, over the new few weeks I be taking a closer look and maybe I even try it out my current project that is using JBoss, JSF (myfaces), EJB3 (hibernate) and PostgreSQL.

First, it looks like the finally have the Mac look and feel with the menu bar.

Second, in the beta version the only font is their monospace font. Switching to any other font loses bold and italic. This I hope they fix in the next release since I personally like Monaco. Well, I am wrong. They actually have others and I have starting using Courier New since bold shows up better than monaco.

The options for formatting code continue to be weak. Only a few options.

Even the advanced options add nothing to the basic palette for formatting Java code.

Code templates. It still seemed hard to find the correct menu combination for editing an initial code template. This is something I have to do for each client. I have to add their copyright or disclaimers to each file and it would be nice if the template editor was easier to use. I could not find the list of text substitutions. I just need YEAR to follow the copyright. Also, I wanted to change __USER__ to my name instead of my login handle. The online help seemed to be out of sync with the version and the directions for editing __USER__ seemed just like the old Forte procedure. Sigh.