I’m flying to Hong Kong early morning tomorrow and won’t be back until next Friday at night and will have limited Internet access while I’m there. You can communicate with me through email but I won’t be on IM clients much I don’t think.

Eclipse-based applications looks and feels native thanks to SWT but once you start gandering at them icons, it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. For the readers out there that are familiar with the Tango Desktop Project, the window below doesn’t look out of place at all, right?

In the Eclipse world, the icons don’t really bother us at all since we’ve been looking at them for so many years. Unsurprisingly, for some clients and users, this doesn’t quite cut it and they want to customize them a little or they want the icons to match their own desktop’s. What if you could appease these people by adding a little ‘Theme’ menu at the top to flip around some options? Or what if the user could just define their own icon preferences…?

If you’ve ever been troubled by icons like the two bug reporters above, e4 CSS support could be the solution to your problems. Feel free to comment on bug 281593 if this piques your interest. You can help shape e4 into the next generation platform that you and your clients need! Join the e4 team, today! :)

Note: I realize that in the Eclipse world we have very specific user interface and icon design guidelines so this may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But hey, if you’re not interested in this, feel free to work on something else! Let me tell you, there’s no shortage of work in the e4 project. ;)

Famitsu has updated its website with (what is likely to be) a snippet of its magazine coverage on Steins;Gate. I’m going to be completely honest here and give my unbiased opinion on the game’s female characters.

They’re not very moe.

Hopefully, some other artwork of the characters will sway my opinion. I shall eagerly await in-game CGs (over the current “sprites”). For those that are wondering, the character designer is huke, the same person that brought us BLACK ROCK SHOOTER.

From what I understand from the article, there’s going to be a lot of “time” and “time travel” related stuff. Early in the game, the protagonist will meet the main girl even though she supposedly died a few hours ago. So yeah, time-related stuff…As to the character’s names, they haven’t provided any furigana yet so I’m going to hold back on referring to the characters with their names since I could be spelling it wrong.

I’ll be providing my crappy “second-handed” translation of any interesting information I find directly here. Any information that I’m confident in and have confirmed will be posted over at Wikipedia.

Anyway, it seems that they’re aiming for a fall release at the moment. That’s not really all that far away so it’s fine by me though I was personally expecting a winter release.

Well, I got my diploma as proof of my successful completion of a bachelor’s degree at UW today. I am now no longer a student and am officially unemployed. I shall now proceed to reap unemployment benefits until I start working in late July.

Of course, a project name is just a project name. It seems the game’s actual name will be Steins;Gate. As to why new information has been unveiled “now”. Well, that’s because it’s actually the 12th in Japan right now.

The website has since been replaced by…another counter. As always, more to come then. *rolls eyes* In the mean time, you can feast your eyes on the magazine scans I’ve managed to secure while grepping through the Internet.

5pb. and Nitroplus announced their new project today, named PROJECT S;G. The countdown is supposed to end on the 12th. I’ll report back with more details then.

According to ANN, who’s citing 2channel, there’ll be a new anime. Updates to follow when I get a hold of any.

I have a (bad) reputation of overscoping…

The above is what one of my supervisors have commented about me during an internship for an unnamed employer.

So what have I been doing now? The latest thing I’ve been dabbling my fingers in is the CSS styling support that’s part of e4. I wanted to see what state the CSS engine’s API was in so I decided to try and extend it to style something beyond simple SWT widgets. I mean, really, just how hard could it be to style some SWT GC code? Behold what a little bit of work can get you…

Please note that some colours are not “perfect” because alpha values are set on the GC.

As you can see, just because the CSS code is in the e4 repository doesn’t necessarily mean it’s just half-baked. Please give the code a spin and try to style your current 3.x code! :) Make a difference by contributing your feedback to help the e4 team evolve this API. And of course, if you’re feeling a little adventurous, feel free to join the e4 team. ;)

Now that finals are over, I’ve been able to spend more time hacking on Eclipse. One of the things I’ve been working on recently is extending the shared editing work that Mustafa showed in his screencast about a year ago to encompass an entire project. Two of the most common issues that users have with the current functionality is its inability to share multiple documents and that it is not “workspace aware” on the receiver’s end. I collected both of these concerns along with the request to distribute resource changes and proceeded to try to hack something out.

My screencast should hopefully demonstrate what I’ve managed thus far. It’s about seven megabytes so it might take a while to load. There’s no audio but I think that the text narration on the screen should be sufficient.

I’m not sure what the next step is (well, beyond what I’ve outlined here), so if you have any suggestions, feel free to comment on the bug. Without a doubt, the concept of distributing resource changes is intrusive and controversial so I’m probably going to have to do more investeigating as to how turning that off will interfere with the shared editor. In any case, I hope that this will be useful to others in the future, particularly those that are interested in trying out pair programming. I’ve only pair programmed a few times (during some late evenings with Igor to meet deadlines :)) but I found it really, really helpful.

Please note that this will not make Galileo.

After much speculation from the gaming community due to the number of trademarks that Namco Bandai registered, Tales of Graces has been confirmed to be the name of the next installment of the series on the Wii console. In other news, we also have confirmation that Tales of Vesperia will be headed to the PS3 with a new character to boot. More details to come in due time.