Class Viewer 5.0 Beta

There is a fairly stable beta version of Class Viewer 5.0 now available on SourceForge. So I think I should say a bit about what's happening under the hood.

First I've done a few clean-up things trying to make the app a bit easier to use and also help it look the same across platforms, so now it will tell you where it's looking for packagedirectory.xml if it can't find it. So you can put it where the app is looking. It is supposed to be looking in the directory from which you're running the program which works fine on Windows, but I'm seeing it do something I think slightly different on Linux.

Oh, yeah, so the app can work just fine across platforms as it is a Java app, but I'm more certain about what it's doing on Windows. So feel free to download it for whatever, but you may have to tweak a few things, but that should be fairly easy.

One thing I've done is fix the math on sizing the screen regardless of resolution so that the app should look roughly the same across resolutions. I'm testing on multiple machines now, more so than before, which is how I even noticed a problem. Freaking thing was giant on the machine I have running Ubuntu Linux.

Biggest change justifying an advance to 5.0 is that I've added in the ability to go to an actual Java file to the method, which I think is cool. So now instead of going to javadocs to the method, if the file is on your hard drive you can open it up and go to the method, if your text editor supports accepting a line number when called, and gedit does so I've defaulted to it.

If your text editor does not support going to line number then the program will just give you the line number of the method before opening it up.

But is that feature useful? I need it. So it's useful to me. Now I can use Class Viewer to open programs I'm working on, which right now mostly means, Class Viewer itself! I think that's sort of neat. And it has been fun doing more programming in this way after so many years. I kind of like, sort of miss it, but not ready to go back into the professional grind with it.

You can download from the main Class Viewer page.

And again, if you're not on Windows it should be easy enough to get it to work on your system without a lot of effort, but I'm just putting it out there for Windows now because that's easier for me.


James