Thursday, March 8, 2007

IntelliJ pierces my heart

My wife would probably raise her eyebrows at me, but I hold a special place in my heart for IntelliJ. It is, for those not in the know, an editor for the illustrious Java programming language, and soon to be for Ruby also. I will be writing a series of articles that basically describe my delight while using IntelliJ. Whenever I encounter a particularly delightful feature, I will write a little about it here on my blog. And yes, delight to me is tinted a particularly fruity shade of purple.

Yesterday, I discovered how easy it is to internationalize (or i8n in l33+5p3@k) a Swing GUI application. While in the wysiwyg editor, I double clicked on a button in my form. I saw a cute little [...] button and thought to myself, "now what in the blazes is that for?". I clicked on it (because that's just what you do when you encounter a strange button) and it popped up a dialog asking me to pick an internationalized string from a property file. How convenient!

I will spare you the tragic details of when I encountered a strange button in Bangkok. Suffice it to say, it is not a memory I care to dredge up...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Well dredge up the damn memory because I want to hear the story! ;) And I am jealous of your IntelliJ, but I did get a Python IDE that I like, so things will be okay for now. I won't make any attempts to sabbotage your IntelliJ... for now *evil laugh*

:)