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GUI Designer For Eclipse
Flu writes "Finally, a free (as in speech and beer) and official GUI designer has been released for Eclipse! Just a few days before the Eclipse 3.0 M5 build was released, a complete plugin for creating GUI's was released as well, as one of the Eclipse tools projects. Check it all out on the official site for the Visual Editor Project. At last, the (probably) best free IDE for Java (and C) contains a GUI editor! Personally, I intend to put up an IBM logo to worship next to my desk, as a thank you for the Eclipse! :-)"
When I first started out with Java, I was a Netbeans user. It was fine for a little while, but then it got to the point where I was fighting its interface more than I was actually coding. Along with that problem, it's also a system resource hog, which I'm guessing was due to all the stuff that it loaded on when it started up- for me, most of that stuff was unneeded since I basically was just using the core API's.
I then come across Eclipse- it was a dream. The interface was sleek and seemed like the IBM teams that worked on it breathed "Keep It Simple Stupid" throughout it's development. Plus, it also runs much faster and I can tell it what to load up and use on my system. However, it's best feature is the fact that it provides a very stable platform for other developers to create their own tools on. Check out this article on the subject over at ACM's Queue: Eclipse: A Platform Becomes an Open-Source Woodstock
For me, the announcement of a decent GUI designer for it is like extra icing on the cake.