I admit I’m no Java expert, but this doesn’t sound like such a bad turn of events to me. In fact, it sounds pretty decent.
Apple’s Technical Note TN2196 discusses the new control styles available within J2SE 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.5:
J2SE 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.5 gives Java applications access to a wide range of native control styles. These new runtime client properties allow your Java application to look and feel more like Cocoa applications than ever, while still enjoying the portability benefits of a pure Java codebase.
Interestingly, one of the complains about Mac OS X Java was:
Apparently Apple decided it wasn’t important to visually distinguish the two types of dialogs by using different icons… Or even using icons that made contextual sense for that matter.
That’d be awful. Except that, well, that’s what native applications do, too, since Mac OS X 10.3. See Tech Note #1378 (from 2005), which explains this change in part:
The rationale for that decision is simple: on Mac OS X, all windows of all launched applications are interleaved. Thus, when an alert pops up, there is no easy way for the user to know which application issued the alert. Replacing the standard icons by the application icon gives a visual clue to the user who can then identify the source. Since the NoteAlert and the StopAlert were the most commonly used alerts, they were changed, but the CautionAlert, rarely used, was unchanged.
So, is there a way to give Java applications custom icons? What, specifically, is wrong with Leopard’s Java anyway?