Netbeans 4.1 RC1 - Pertty!!
I installed NetBeans 4.1 RC1 onto my computer a few days ago and this is what I saw when I launched it for the first time.
Is that pretty or what? The NetBeans.org crew have definitely been hard at working giving my new found favorite IDE a well deserved makeover. However, the question remains as to whether the changes are just skin deep.
I have not used this new release much, however, I do have a few first impressions of it. The first thing that caught me a bit by surprise is that if you open a project that you were working on in the Beta release of netBeans 4.1 the RC1 version has to do this little import thing. This prevents the project from being used in the Beta version again. For an IDE that uses Ant as its project management I find this a little odd. However, when it was doing the import it did do one really cool trick. The project that I am working on uses Java 2 SDK 1.4.2. When I installed netBeans it installed with Java 5 SDK 1.5. This meant that 1.4.2 was not setup. However, during the import process, netBeans detected the missing SDK and asked me to set it up by opening the Java Platform Manager.
One thing I have always found strange about netBeans is the default indent and tab size. Do people really use indenting of 8 spaces? I certainly don’t. I tend to use 4 for Java classes and 2 for JSP and HMTL. This is usually one of the first things that I end up changing. Also, why is anti-aliasing of fonts not set on by default?
Anyway, I will post more thoughts as they come to me.
