Alex headshot

AlBlue’s Blog

Macs, Modularity and More

Innovation on the Mac

Java Mac 2007

For those of you that don't get it, this is the kind of thing that goes to make the Mac a great platform to live and work. I'm not talking about the combined panel, but the thoughts that go into making useful information and presenting it in a useful way.

In this case, the new WebKit has a diagnostics panel (aka lnspector) that can show the breakdown of elements on a page. Note the use of colour to easily distinguish different metadata types as well as the length of bars showing download time; in addition, the summary bar at the bottom shows which resources take the most data transfer.

Frankly, you don't get this kind of application in a Java app most of the time. Either the coders are too busy worrying about a GridBagLayout just positioning the icons, or they're writing a highly generic capable-of-many-implementations (even though there's only one) adapter factory singleton provider for generating multiple pluggable analysis modules, and then just dumping the information in a JTable.

Oh, and you want this functionality in an Objective-C/Cocoa app? Just embed WebView in the NIB. Heck, you can even do it from Java if you wanted.