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Wiseguy · Guest

I had been using NetBeans 3.6 for a few months and was able to quickly
generate Swing form classes and put together applications that would
have previously taken me about six times as much labor.

Anyway, I went ahead and downloaded 4.0 and within the first three hours
of use I found four consistent bugs in the gui interface. Then I looked
at the bug reporting policies for the project and said "NOT". They use
mailing lists and an issue tracking system that requires registration
and even their newsgroups require a real mail header to post
information. Sorry guys, but my real email address is sacred.

Perhaps they need to quit adding new intellectually stimulating features
and work on getting the bugs out of the core features first:
Unfortunately, a common deficiency in open-source development models.

bugs found:

1) selecting several controls on a form, then attempting to block change
an event callback for the set only changes one of the objects and seems
to choose which one at random.

2) properties dialog often shows up as a small box (not resizable by the
native window manager) that is too small to show the control properties.

3) when a dialog is docked on the right size of the workspace it resizes
its width (shrinks itself) even if the user drags it out so that you can
actually see the text in it.

4) file/jar dialog is inconsistent in how it treats filepaths.
sometimes it enters the file as a relative and other times as a complete
path. Even worse, sometimes /compat1/java/devel/java has shown up as
/compat1/java/devel/java/java. Where the hell did that come from?

Yeah, I've heard the argument "It's free. Quit your bitchin" but is
there really any excuse for releasing software that hasn't even been
rudimentarily tested? I noticed these bugs during my first and only
attempt to use the thing.

I'm going to eclipse...