Java’s full screen behavior is to exit from full screen whenever you give focus to some other window which is NOT what you want. QW’s full screen is designed to give you a semi-locked in space, where you attention can be kept on the text but you can break off to do something else then come back to it. QW spoofs full screen behavior, this is because Windows handles full screen apps very badly, Java Swing handles it even worse. The way full screen works on Macs is also different. I would have to change that behavior and probably have to create new components to get the look and feel I’m after. For example, in some places moving your mouse over a button shows a background, in other places it doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong it is also an amzing project but the number of tweaks and twists required to make QW look even close to how it does on Windows would be huge and some behavior I struggling to understand. Now, Macs have a similar project, called Quaqua however it is has recently fallen into disrepair, for example it doesn’t use the new font for El Capitan and there are a number of visual issues with it. It handles a lot of the underlying gubbins needed to make components look like they should on Windows. A lot of this success comes from the use of a amazing LNF (look-n-feel) called JGoodies. However, with effort, as QW shows, you can produce something that looks nice and behaves well. A substantial amount of my development time is spent dealing with these quirks and oddities (don’t get me started on layouts and component sizes). The problem is that it is also a verbose, complicated mess that is poorly documented, has non-intuitive design and tempremental behavior. QW is currently uses Java Swing, which is a fantastic toolkit for doing just about anything that you might want to do in a GUI. But there are so many things wrong I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m best off waiting. Over the past week I’ve been tinkering around, trying to make QW not look like utter arse on my Mac. Not until at least version 3 when I plan to move QW to JavaFX which is the replacement for Java Swing. QW on a Mac won’t be happening for quite a while.

I’ll save you the long version so you can stop reading now. I’ve actually been able to use QW for writing lately, hurrah! Specifically I’ve gotten back to editing my first book (it’s been close to a year since I last looked at it) and found that I actually quite like my own writing and I’m not polishing a turd, double hurrah!!īut my mind is again turning to the future of QW and to that end I started trying to get the Mac version up and running.

How to make windows look like mac 2015