Some rough edges of nimble couple

I've been using NetBeans 6.5 for some time with Nimbus laf that came with Java 6u10. I have to say I like Nimbus, I am using it and not going to switch back to Metal or Windows. BTW I've always liked the former more, because of good looking toolbar and editor tabs. Anyway, there are two things, for now at least, that annoy me in NetBeans working under Nimbus (I believe these are NetBeans issues) - the colors of editor tabs and their inconsistence and ugly usage of border around editor pane. Look at the picture below.

Hopefully the selected tab will get less saturated to make it less agressive and more readable for the eye and border at the top of editor pane will long enough to reach its ends :). It will make tabs look more natural, more finished. For now it seems like tabs are alien to the rest of the NetBeans ui. They look more like buttons, because of this line issue.

I know glitches I've mentioned will not make you scream in the middle of the night sweating, but refining those would please my aesthetic needs :). Of course I am not the only one pointing those issues. Just search for "nimbus tabs" in nbusers@netbeans.org mailing list and you would see polished look does matter to developers.

Bad Picasa and bad Google Earth!

It was a pain for me to discover today that two fine pieces of software from Google - Picasa and Google Earth doesn't allow me to write with diacritical marks. Both programs have assigned actions for keys combinations that normally would have allow me to write letters with diacritical marks. It is unfortunate, but even more unfortunate is I can't change those shortcuts. This plainly sucks! 

I wanted to report both of these issues only to find there is no issue tracking neither for Picasa, nor for Google Earth. Grrr! So the only way to tell Google to fix it is to use Forum? I will not leave this bug as it is - I want to use Google Earth and Picasa with pleasure, not with anger :).

I think that good solution is to let user to change those shortcuts. I understand that changing it now, when both software is quite long on the market, isn't an option. I would be more to happy to do it, if Google had fixed this bug. 

Am I alone there? JavaFX media playback problem

The wait is over. Let the wait for next version begin! 

As said in This Ain't Yours' Dad's Java podcast good folks at Sun worked very hard to get 1.0 out. Now they have lot's of feedback (good and bad, but hearing in Java Posse #221 people cheering JavaFX and Joe Nuxoll's warm word about it at Devoxx conf shows that Sun's done good job).

For me JavaFX isn't painless experience - and I am not talking from developer perspective - I haven't yet coded any JavaFX - when I tried to run any JavaFX sample involving media all I got was java.exe crash. At first I thought it was problem with my system so tried to reinstall everything what could be fault: DirectX, SP3, codecs. No luck. So I filled bug report at JavaFX issue tracker with id RT-2530.

Surprisingly I haven't yet seen any votes or have found similar stories. Some people were getting UnsupportedMediaExceptions, but no crashes apart from vague "it's crashing firefox".  If you have similar problems to mine please vote! You should first register which is free and easy.