Eclipse Leopard Glitches

November 2nd, 2008

I figured since the Android SDK comes with an Eclipse plugin, I should use Eclipse when learning Android. I think that’s probably a mistake.

Split Panes

Here is what split panes look like with Eclipse on Leopard:

I added the red box to indicate where you’d normally expect to drag the splitter up and down. While this works, the cursor does not change. So as you move your mouse over the splitter, it feels unresponsive. Even weirder, the cursor DOES change, but it is always about 15-30 pixels below the splitter. It’s as if they are adding some insets for a menu bar that does not exist.

Weird GUI Artifacts

Check out the glowing “Application Toggle” text on this screen:

GUI flaws like this seem to pop up all over the place with Eclipse on Leopard.

Android Plugin Weirdness

The screen above is from the Android Eclipse plugin. You should be able to click the Add… button to add additional activities. It worked for me once or twice (I think), but usually I see this:

Not only is the dialog blank, it is completely unresponsive. All I can do is hit Cancel.

Bring on IDEA

I guess I need to figure out what it takes to develop Android apps in IDEA. I do like that Eclipse automatically keeps R.java up-to-date, and I like that I can launch the emulator from the IDE. Hopefully those tasks are easy to do from the command-line so I can go back to IDEA.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Android, Bugs, Java. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

5 Responses to “Eclipse Leopard Glitches”

Kelsey Says:

It’s kind of ironic. As a student, I have to use Java, which has a lot of fiddly bits. To deal with them, I use Eclipse, which has a lot fiddly bits. It wouldn’t have as many if I were using it on Windows or Linux. But I use OS X to avoid THEIR fiddly bits.

Fiddly bits everywhere! It’s this kind of thing that shies people away from computer science.

Apparently IDEA has some kind of student license. I applied, but I’m not sure what to expect?

November 3rd, 2008 at 2:34 am

McQ Says:

Have you reported any of these issues at bugs.eclipse.org? It was random chance that I saw this blog posting, so I’ll look into them, but your chances of seeing them fixed are *much* greater if you’ve entered bug reports.

November 4th, 2008 at 5:13 pm