Sometimes things are hard to find

I answered a question earlier today from someone who wrote: "Is there a keyboard shortcut to jump to a method, when editing a class, without using the Navigator window." I feel the writer's pain. The Navigator window in the NetBeans IDE is really nice, but I don't want to take my hand off the keyboard to use it.

Fortunately, I can use the Navigator without a mouse. Roman Strobl has blogged about this before. While in the editor I press Ctrl-7. This gives focus to the Navigator window where I can start typing the name of the method that I want to jump to. In this case, the method is setResultColor(). So I type an 's' and the Navigator changes its selection to the first entry with an 's':

As luck would have it, the first method listed is the one I want, so I press Enter and focus returns to the editor and the cursor is on setResultColor(). I could have typed more characters if needed to narrow down the selection.

The key issue here is that this feature is tough to find. That's also a topic Roman has discussed recently. In this particular case Ruth Kusterer has added a FAQ entry that discusses this, but I'm thinking I might add even more details to it so that the use case is clear. And of course, we need better visibility for the FAQ so that users will know that it has the answer. :-)

Speaking of things that are difficult to find, apparently some folks had trouble finding the Sun office in Austin, Texas for the recent December Austin Java User Group (AJUG) meeting. The Google Local feature apparently has some rough spots; this link is pretty interesting. The map is correct, but the street name is wrong. We're not on Guarita Ct. The office is on Riata Park Ct, which you won't find out unless you zoom in at least one level. Not very user friendly.

Anyway, the folks who made it to the meeting reportedly had a good time. The very talented Eitan Suez was the emcee. The first presentation was from Dave Havrda, who did a demo of the cool new module building tools in the NetBeans IDE.

Plugging your own features into an IDE has never been easier.

Dave was followed by Sridhar Reddy, who talked about the Peabody and Glassfish projects. Project Peabody is an initiative to provide a more collaborative development environment for future generations of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE). Project Glassfish aims to drive innovation in the J2EE/application server space, to improve developer access to J2EE sources and increase transparency in J2EE development.

I was not able to attend because I am in Prague attending planning meetings for the next release of the NetBeans IDE. The weather has been cold, but thankfully dry (I was prepared for rain and snow). The picture below is of the Prague Castle, taken from up on high in the Petrin Tower.

The best part of the trip, as usual, was getting to meet with folks who I normally just get to talk with on the phone and exchange emails with. I spent time wandering the city with daily-blogger and tutorial creator extraordinaire Geertjan Wielenga. Security has been on his mind since he's been helping create materials on secure web services, so in the photo below he shows the prison used to hold folks who forget the security attributes in their configuration files. :-)

While Prague has been fun, I am bummed that I didn't get to attend the AJUG meeting. My thanks to the folks who helped organize and run it. From left to right below: Eitan Suez, Sridhar Reddy, Rob Ratcliff, Ernest Hill, and Albert Leigh.