Doing this is easily described as: replace brass collar with appropriately sized spring.  But for as simple as that sounds, you see the question asked on knife forums, how?  E.g. go here  and search for the word “spring.”

In this first photo you see how the stone rectangular metal blank shown) is held.  The round knob/handle is tightened onto it’s threads pushing the brass collar into the, the front stone holder (black plastic piece on the right of the metal blank) clamping the stone holder in place.

To remove the stone, you unthread the knob, relieving pressure on the collar and front stone holder, and remove the stone.

Normally, you’ll put a new stone in between the black plastic holders, re-thread the knob and move on.  To speed up the process, put a compression spring in place of the brass collar.  I found one at my local Ace/TruValue hardware store in the fitting aise for $1.29.  The dimensions were 1-7/16″ x 7/16″ x .041.  This is just a wee bit longer than the brass collar and just big enough to slip over the 5/16″ diameter rod without rattling around.  If you have an option, go for something made of stainless as the sharpener will get wet if you’re using the water stones properly.

One last little problem to solve.  Everytime you remove a stone, notice how in the picture above, the front stone holder will slide down the rod if it’s tipped down.  This isn’t a huge problem.  It just means you have to pull it back out a bit more when loading the next stone.

I reduced this effect by gluing the brass collar on the other side of the front stone holder with a dab of waterproof adhesive.  This will keep it in place, but is easy to remove and won’t mar the rod.  Besides acting as a stop for the stone holder, it’s a convenient place to store the part without losing it.  If the spring ever fails midway through sharpening something, I can always return the brass collar to its original function rather than have to immediately run to the store to find a new spring.

Now, changing stones is done with a simple squeeze and release as shown in the clip:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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There are some rules that most gun owners have been explained and apparently a lot of them just don’t understand:

Cooper’s Rule #2:
Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. (For those who insist that this particular gun is unloaded, see Rule 1.)

NRA Rule #1
ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.

At an indoor range, when a shooter turns his gun half-sideways to rack the slide so that it’s pointed at the wall a mere 10-15 feet downrange, he is risking blasting a large chip of concrete out of the wall and causing it and the bullet’s jacket to possibly fragment and fly into all the shooters to that side of the range.

At the same range, when the gun goes click instead of bang and the shooter tips it up to stare in puzzlement at the chamber, she also risk shooting out lights or target carrier cables/rails.

At an outdoor range, when a shooter lazily holds a rifle with the barrel tipped up, that shooter risks send a round over the berm to somewhere beyond, perhaps a home or business off in the distance…where people might be present.

These risks aren’t unfounded.  I’ve witnessed first hand, lights and target carrier cables getting shot out by careless shooters.  I just recently joined a gun club who’s outdoor range has been shut down twice over the years because rounds “were lost” over the berm, landing in residential properties nearly a mile in the distance (berm heights were increased and blue sky barriers have been added to reduce the risks of it happening again).

Did these happen because someone was just reloading their handgun, clearing a malfunction or handing a gun to someone else?  In these cases, no.  Each involved someone actively shooting being careless while repositioning a gun in their hands or not managing recoil.

But I’ve also witnessed unintentional discharges (yes I’m avoiding the negligent vs accidental debate) where rounds slammed almost harmlessly into the walls and ceilings far too close to the firing line for comfort while people were carelessly manipulating their guns not during controlled, aimed fire.  And I’m just one guy who doesn’t go to the range all that much.  If I’ve seen all that first hand, I shudder to think what goes at the thousands of ranges with the millions of shooters when I’m not present.

Sure, range owners design their buildings to take the abuse…because it’s going to happen.  But you and I ultimately end up paying extra in range fees for every time someone hits something other than the designated backstop.  Trust me, you hit the lights or target carrier, you’ll be asked to pay for the damage.  You hit a person?  You’ll be paying in more than hard currency.

There are a lot of experts and “experts” that will disagree with me.   Just watch how many seasoned shooters play loose with the muzzles of their handguns during reloading and administrative handling of their guns.  Who am I to question their lucky streaks?

But with few exceptions**, at shooting ranges, even ones with courses of fire that involve movement, you really can do everything you need to do with a firearm while keeping it pointed at safe backstops.  Even shooters with disabilities can learn safe techniques.  There’s no need to point it up or sideways.  Really.

** One being use of gravity to help unload the opened cylinder of revolver.

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Image courtesy Irish Typepad

I recently heard an interesting variation on this. A woman I know was leaving work around 9pm. Right after she merged onto the highway, a car swerved in from the left directly in front of the car in front of her and rapidly stopped, right in the slow lane. Why? She doesn’t know. But this happened so quickly that she, and apparently the person in front of her, felt they might rear-end the person and both drifted left into the next lane over. While it initially looked clear, apparently a semi was approaching them quickly from the rear evidenced by blaring air horns and a big grill showing in her rear view mirrors.

The trucker seemed pissed. Being cut off while hauling a big, heavy load might do that. That’s very understandable.

But the horns kept blaring.

This woman, after avoiding nearly rear-ending another driver and then nearly getting rear ended by a huge truck, surely amped up on adrenaline, started getting scared about what the trucker might do. But she kept her cool.

She quickly moved back to the now open slow lane where there was an exit coming up. She knew the exit dropped you onto narrower residential neighborhood streets. She knew the area and figured a truck driver, wanting to retaliate would want to avoid driving in such an area. And if he did follow her off the highway, she’d be able to easily get away from the driver on the tighter surface streets.

Well, the truck driver didn’t follow her. Instead of just stopping or reentering the highway, she drove back to the previous entrance on the local roads giving the trucker time to move on in case he was still stewing and waiting for her and then leisurely drove home without further incident.

Interestingly, getting off a highway to go into a residential or unfamiliar area when being followed by a road rager is normally not what you’d want to do. You don’t want to go where your likelihood of summonsing help is low. But this woman, didn’t just blindly follow this line of thinking. She maintained composure, used the context of her specific situation, and did the exact opposite of the generalization, but for a very good reason.

Now I’ve been in a similar position. While merging onto a highway, we accidentally cut off a trucker who then proceeded to try to ram us and then run us off the road. We stopped on the shoulder, but the trucker stopped ahead waiting for us. This was during pre-cellphone days and what ultimately ended the situation was us sprinting past the stopped truck, getting to the next exit and local roads where the truck driver wouldn’t want to continue hassling us and lingering there until the trucker decided to move on.

So I don’t think it’s outrageous to worry that a pissed off trucker might attack. And, in this woman’s case, it may never have escalated to that point. But her willingness to spend a few minutes more getting home at the end of the day by essentially “walking” away from a potential confrontation helped ensure that it didn’t escalate. Sure it cost her a little time. But to her it was worth it.

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I’ve had a Safety Seal tire patch kit for several years. I got it back when I was wheeling my HUMMER and have used it several times. For the past few years, it’s just sat in a tool box in the back of my truck, unused. Until this weekend.

Saturday, we got in the car and the driver information center (DIC) lit up, “Check Left Rear Tire Pressure.” Ugggh. It was holding well at 26 pounds, and since we weren’t going far, I didn’t delay the outing. Upon return I topped the pressure off at the recommended 35lbs.

First chance I had Sunday, I checked the pressure on the DIC, 26lbs again A quick check of the tire with a flash light revealed a screw embedded between the lugs.

I found the Safety Seal kit, pulled the screw, reamed the hole with the included tool (to properly size it), inserted the patch, trimmed it, and reinflated, right then and there…15 minutes. I didn’t play the fill-the-leak-until-I-can-waste-an-hour-or-so-at-the-tire-shop-on-Monday game. Yeah!

And as if that wasn’t triumph enough, I discovered another screw in the flat tire on my riding mower Monday. Since I remembered where everything was and had recently “practiced” with it, that fix took all of 5 minutes. Double yeah!

But what was with all the screws? We’re having our basement finished. And despite our builder’s attention to detail, small pokey things apparently have managed to sneak out onto the street and lawn here and there. I’m not thrilled, but since I don’t have to waste time going to the tire shop to get it fixed, I’m no overly upset.

The kit I have (amazon affiliate link) costs about $45 and is very sturdy.  The all metal probe and insertion tools won’t break as easily as some less expensive patch kits out there.  I’ve patch a few holes in the multi-ply light truck tires on my HUMMER.  So it’ll stand up to frequent use if you’re a contractor who frequently gets punctures on your work truck at debris strewn job sites.

If you’re capable of changing a tire, you’re capable of easily patching small holes in a tire with one of these kits.  Toss it in the back of the vehicle with a portable compressor (pliers, flashlight, and a pressure gauge might help too).  It might sit there for a few years unused, but if you have to use it just once, you’ll save yourself time and money not changing to spare and/or paying the tire shop to fix it for you.

I’ve used it 5 or 6 times now and have never had a follow-up issue with any of the sealed punctures.  It’s a good product, that’s well worth the money. I highly recommend it, and they didn’t pay me to say that.

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My wife is friends with a commercial airline pilot who happens to own a Pitts S-2C aerobatic biplane. A year or so ago, he invited us down to a pancake breakfast put on at a local airfield by the Young Eagles of EAA Chapter 1229. That first time, he took our family up in a Mooney 4-seater (model unknown to me) that he “borrowed” from a pilot friend of his. The second time we went to the breakfast, he had his Pitts available and took other members of my family for rides in it, one at a time. My dad posted some videos clips of the aerobatic ride Bill provided him. Unfortunately, we ran out of time that day and I missed the opportunity for a ride of my own.

Bill made sure that I didn’t miss the opportunity at yesterday’s pancake breakfast. After getting our fill of blueberry pancakes, eggs, and sausage (should I have eaten first???), Bill took me up for an amazing ride!

I too captured some video clips and photos. I also fired up Google My Tracks on my android phone to capture the route of our flight. I’ve tried to blend the three into a integrated view of the outing using Google’s My Maps:

In case that doesn’t work so well in your browser, I included links to the pictures and video here as well.

Thank you Bill for the amusement park ride in the sky.

Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (Baldwin Lake)

The confluence of the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers with Prescott, WI to the right. Notice contrast of the muddy Mississippi and the clear St. Croix.

We discovered this unexpected gem of a corn field carving, a Thank You to the troops.

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Yesterday, I finally, got my first chance to introduce two non-shooters to the sport.  These two, a married couple, were clearly supporters of our Second Amendment rights, staunch ones at that.  But it was principle that drove their support, not first hand experience.  Bob had only shot carbines during Air Force basic training over 40 years ago.  Other than that, neither had firearms experience of any sort.

I opted to ease them into the experience of learning to shoot a pistol over three separate sessions, the first being “classroom-style” at my home, covering the basics of firearm safety, and fundamentals of shooting such as sight picture, stance, grip and trigger control, hold, etc.  I used actual firearms in this session to demonstrate various things and it was clear that Eva was a bit apprehensive being around the handguns right at the start.

So, the following day, rather than dive in and go to the range, where you often are standing next to other shooters making lots of noise, I dug a rarely-used, pellet pistol from the back of my gun cabinet and set up a backstop in my basement.  This pistol shoots so slow and quietly that recoil and noise are virtually non-issues.  And while it has a horrible trigger and is very inaccurate, the session proved invaluable in easing any fears of firing a gun for the first time.

I let that session sink in and the next day we went to a nearby indoor range with a .22 caliber Sig Trailside, my only reliable .22 pistol, and a bunch of ammo in hand.  In no time, both Eva and Bob had fired a couple magazines through the Trailside with very respectable groups (click through the links and zoom in on the targets) and smiles on their faces.  The took turns shooting until tired.  Bob took me up on the opportunity to shoot a few of my carry-worth pistols in .38 special, 9mm, and .45 caliber.

We all had a great time.  It was very rewarding to get these two started on shooting.  I say started, because I heard them talking about where to shoot when they got back home to their home state of New York.

I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some more shooting fun in their future.  I wholly expect that more of this sort of thing is going to be in my future.

BTW, Eva and Bob happen to be my parents

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I have an opportunity coming up to help some others learn a little about shooting handguns (more on that later).  It’s always good to start new shooters out with a small caliber and not-too light or small gun in order to ease the uninitiated into the experience with little shock from noise or recoil.

Looking through my collection, I found my only reliable .22 caliber handgun happens to be a Sig Trailside competition model.

This model has adjustable right-handed grips that work well for me shooting one handed.  You can shoot them two handed, but it’s not an ideal setup to do that.  In the picture below you can see how the thumb-rest and flat left side might interfere with a good two-handed grip and make left-handed use impractical.

So I decided to swap them out for some symmetric grips.  One of the few US dealers with aftermarket parts and accessories for the Trailside is Larry’s Guns.  They’ve got quite an assortment of grips for target pistols.  I went with what they have listed as the Hammerli Trailside stippled wood sport grip.  These are walnut grips made by Rink Formgriffe.

A chunk of cash and USPS priority mail shipping got them to me in two days. They install fairly easily and look great.

As you can see, they’re completely symmetric. So shooting working with new shooters, shooting two handed or lefty should work a lot better now.

As a bonus, I discovered a pleasant side effect of the new grips. The old grips made pushing up the slide lock lever to lock the slide back without and empty magazine very difficult. The new sport grips allow a bit of the lever to peek out past the grip so you can, with your grip had (if you’re right handed) apply upward pressure on the lever while pulling the slide back with the left hand.

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How I did the conversion I’ll leave as a secret.  Trust me, it’s not an approach you’d want to use.

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In part 1, I explained why Windows Tablet PC users don’t have a very user friendly experience when inputting text into Java Swing applications. I presented a prototype solution to the issue that had some problems. Since then, I’ve:

• worked out some bugs
• added support for JTextAreas
• come up with a way to enable floating TIP on all JTextComponents in a Swing application
• updated the demo application
• decided to release some source code in case anyone want’s to critically review it

Adding JTextArea Support

In part 1,
the test applet only had text fields. I avoided text areas because they are often wrapped inside JScrollPanes/JViewports and this complicates things. I generalize the solution in this part so the demo and sources show that this is supported.

Use of the JFloatingPane

In my first attempt, I added the native TextField to the parent of the JTextField that had focus. This was necessary to ensure that the TextField was considered visible and would behave like a real TextField. But it had the bad side effect of potentially messing up the layout of the Container holding the JTextFields.

I remedied the problem by searching for the JRootPane parent of the JTextComponent, adding the native TextField to the back of the JLayeredPane.DEFAULT_LAYER layer so it will be visible but not interfere with the layout of the Swing text component’s Container.

Enabling for all JTextComponents in An App

In my first cut at the application, I explicitly installed FocusListeners on all Swing text components for which I wanted to enable the floating TIP. That is manageable in a small application, but fails to take care of text components in common dialogs like the JFileDialog.

I toyed with the idea of using byte code modification to, at runtime, inject code into the look and feel or into the Swing JTextComponent class itself to register the the FocusListener. But with a little research I found another [simpler] way be listen for all focus events on JTextComponents.

If your code is running in a JVM without a restrictive SecurityManager, you can add an AWTEventListener to the AWT event dispatcher that will receive all events of interest. The apps I’m working on are delivered with signed code and aren’t restricted. Further, since I ultimately plan to implement this Swing-Tablet workaround as a signed JRE extension to install only on Tablet PCs JREs, I’m content not to address the problem of running in a locked down applet.

I’m using the following code to listen for focus gained/lost events on all JTextComponents.

import java.awt.AWTEvent;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import java.awt.event.AWTEventListener;
import java.awt.event.FocusEvent;
import javax.swing.text.JTextComponent;

...

Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().addAWTEventListener(
   new AWTEventListener()
   {
      public void eventDispatched(AWTEvent event)
      {
         FocusEvent fe = (FocusEvent)event;
         if(fe.getComponent() instanceof JTextComponent)
         {
            if(event.getID() == FocusEvent.FOCUS_GAINED)
               /*tell swing-tablet code to start workaround on JTextComponent that just got focus*/;
            else if(event.getID() == FocusEvent.FOCUS_LOST)
               /*tell swing-tablet code to stop workaround on JTextComponent that just lost focus*/;
         }
      }
   },
   AWTEvent.FOCUS_EVENT_MASK);

Since this code will only be run when running on a Windows system that has the floating TIP, it shouldn’t affect performance on other systems. Further, this approach does not seem to have any perceived performance impact on the applications I’ve tested it in.

The Updated Demo

The demo can be run in two ways.

1. Java Web Start Application	or	2.Executable Jar
If you have Java Web Start installed, just click the “Launch” icon below. If your browser is not Java WebStart enabled, get it here.		Download the following file, save it, then double click it. SOTPCDemo-2007-04-25.jar If it does not start when you double click it, then open a command prompt and run java -jar SOTPCDemo-2007-04-25.jar from the directory where you saved it.

You should expect to see an application that looks like this.

When putting focus on swing text fields or areas the floating TIP button should appear near the cursor and move with it as you type with a keyboard if you have one attached.

If you have trouble running this demo or if it doesn’t work as advertised, please let me know.

The Source

You can download the sources (bundled with the compiled jar) here:

  SOTPCDemo-2007-04-25.zip

The code is provided as is via the The MIT License. I plan to maintain it, so please work with me if you have suggestions or enhancements.

Coming up in Part 3

• Probably some bug fixes as I get feedback
• Providing Swing analog to Window’s right-click context menu that provides Copy/Cut/Paste/Select All/Delete menu items
• Installing it as a JRE extension so that all Swing apps on your Tablet PC will become floating TIP enabled. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll achieve this, but I’ll figure something out.

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I became a Tablet PC user this past summer when I acquired a TabletKiosk i7210 eo (an Ultra Mobile PC) running Windows XP Tablet Edition. My primary job is as a Java developer and I have done a fair amount of development using Java’s Swing windowing toolkit.

I very quickly learned that apps written using this windowing toolkit don’t work like regular windows apps on a tablet PC. They don’t offer access to the floating text entry window (Floating TIP) forcing the user to enter text via the text input panel at the bottom of the screen, a more cumbersome method of entry.

The Floating TIP

When running a normal Windows app on a tablet PC and you put focus in a text field/area/panel that doesn’t offer ink-based text entry support (most apps don’t), a small button will appear hovering near the cursor. This button is used to open the floating Tablet Input Panel (TIP) which lets Tablet PC users enter text in a variety of ways without the use of a physical keyboard.

For instance, here is the floating TIP button on the start run text entry field:

When clicked, the floating TIP appears near where the button used to be and the user can enter text via the on-screen keyboard or via a couple methods of handwriting.

Java Swing Text Entry – A 3rd rate experience

Anytime you have to enter text on a tablet PC using something other than “inking,” many tablet PC users consider it a second rate experience having to use the floating TIP. Well when a text field isn’t recognized by Windows at all, you have to use the non-floating TIP at the bottom of the screen, what I’d consider to be a third rate experience.

Here are the issues:

Issue #1 – Accessing the TIP Button is Not Always Convenient

First you click in the field you want to enter positioning the caret where you want to insert text or selecting text you want to delete or over type. Next you find the TIP button on the Windows task bar next to the Start button.

Since the UMPC is using a rather smallish touch screen, I’m limited to 1024×600 resolution. So I have configured the task bar to not stay on top of other windows so that I can get that last little bit of screen space. It is very common for one or more windows to be covering up the task bar. So I’ve got to minimize or move windows to see the task bar. Alternatively, I mapped one of the hardware buttons to the Start menu so I can pop it open just to bring the entire start bar to the front.

Issue #2 – Non-floating TIP wastes space

When you click the TIP button, it opens an onscreen menu that’s takes up 15-25% of your screen and forces all applications that are visible to shrink to fit in the area above it. This wastes space while it is visible. And if you’re using an app where all text entry needs to be done via the non-floating TIP, you basically end up keeping it open most of the time.

Worse however, is when you close the TIP panel, Windows doesn’t always resize your windows to the sizes they were before the TIP was opened. It seems it will do it properly for the window that had focus when you opened the TIP if that same window has focus when you close the TIP. But all other windows remained shortened. And it never resizes Java applications to their pre-TIP sizes, at least for me.

But Why is Java Swing Broken?

Java Swing is broken because it doesn’t use “native” components. Instead it paints all components you see in the user interface. However, a Tablet PC only provides the floating TIP button support for native Windows fields.

For similar reasons, Java Swing is not the only windowing system that’s broken. Firefox, a cross platform browser, is afflicted with a similar problem, I presume, because they’re not using standard Windows text edit controls. There is an add-on called GeckoTIP that adds floating TIP support for Firefox users on Tablet PCs.

Also, apps built on the cross platform GTK+ toolkit are also broken. I use GAIM (recently renamed Pigin IM) as an IM client. It uses GTK+ for it’s windowing. On my tablet, I have to use the non-floating TIP method to send messages.

So the problem is in the way that these windowing libraries are implemented. But trying to be cross platform and do their own rendering, they lose the benefit of the floating TIP on Windows Tablet PCs.

Why Hasn’t Sun Fixed Java?

Honestly, I don’t know. I’ll speculate that there are a few factors:

1. The tablet PC community is still relatively small. It’s not gotten the large corporate evangelism that it’s members feel it should have. And frankly, using a keyboard-less tablet for general computing is a bit daunting to most computer users who have enough trouble making their software do what they want while using the familiar keyboard.
2. Tablet PC users simply haven’t complained enough. If you search Sun’s Java bug database for “tablet pc” sorted by relevance it, seems that people haven’t filed all that many bugs regarding input methods issues specific to Tablet PC.s
3. Sun doesn’t care about tablet PC users. For the bugs that were filed, there is been little or no response by Sun. As some of the non-Sun employee comments reveal, this isn’t necessarily about Tablet PCs. Some of the tablet input features are important for PDAs and smartphones sporting touch screens.

Regardless of why, history has shown that it’s not going to to get fixed anytime soon.

(FWIW, in my research, I found a comment here speculating that Java 6 was using off screen peers for all Swing text components and that might fix add native floating TIP support for Swing apps. But I experimented with the Java 6 betas and with the Java 1.6.0_01 release and it doesn’t magically add floating TIP support to Swing applications)

My Efforts

I recently started a new Java project that’s a Swing application that I expect to use on my UMPC a lot. So the lack of floating tip became very annoying and motivated me to pursue fixing the problem.

The “offscreen’ peer approach described in the comment referenced earlier gave me a good starting idea. I experimented with it and came up with the following.

The Approach

Basically:

• Add a javax.swing.JTextField to the UI
• Create a native java.awt.TextField and when the Swing field gets focus, add the native field as a sibling component to the Swing field, give the focus to the native field, and make it 1×1. This is enough to make it considered visible, but on Windows, the native field is actually not visible at this size. Doing this makes the floating TIP button appear near the native field.
• Forward all keyboard events from the native text field to the Swing field so that what you type into the native field is reflected in the Swing field
• As the state of the Swing field are updated (text, caret position, selection start/end), update the native field so that it’s state is in sync with the Swing field. This way if you do a copy or cut on it, it will contain the selection of the Swing field
• As the caret moves in the Swing field, move the native field to the location of the caret so that the floating TIP button follows the caret
• Disable the native field’s focus traversal keys. Instead intercept the keystrokes and check them against the Swing fields registered focus traversal keys. If encountered, transfer focus back to the Swing field, make the native field non-focusable, and request transfer of focus in the appropriate direction

It sounds intricate, but really isn’t all that bad. More importantly, it can all be done via event listeners. So there is no need to create special subclasses of the default Swing JTextComponents to modify the classes via code injection or some other form of bytecode modifciation. The real benefit is that you don’t have to change your UI to use differerent components that don’t behave like the default ones.

One other benefit is that it doesn’t use any native code. So it won’t have any special deployment needs.

Does it Work?

So far it does for me. And I asked for testing assistance over here at the Origami Project forums and a couple people reported that it worked and one reported that it didn’t.
Also I’ve encountered a few issues where passing special keystrokes such as Ctrl-Shift-End/Ctrl-Shift-Home doesn’t work. But I think I’m on the right track and can probably get it working more reliably.

Thus, I’m not confident enough today to say “I have a Solution!” But I am pretty confident that if I can find some testers to help me work out the kinks, that I will be able to reach that point.

Running the Tests

Do you want to help me test it out? I hope so. If you

• Have a tablet PC
• Are running Windows XP Tablet edition or Vista
• Have Java 1.2 or higher installed in your web browser
• And currently see the floating TIP button when you run native Windows apps

then run the test applet by opening this page.

What to expect

You should see an applet that looks like the following screen captures but without the frame and close button. There will be three fields.

1) The first is a native java.awt.TextField. When it receives focus, you should see the floating TIP button appear. A right click will bring up the Windows popup menu that contains Copy, Cut and Paste plus a few other possible menu items.

2) The second is a plain Swing javax.swing.JTextField. When it get’s focus, the floating TIP button will not appear, and to enter text without a keyboard, you’ll have to use the TIP from the task bar.

3) The third field is a Swing java.swing.JTextField that I augmented per the approach described above. If all goes well, when you put focus on it, the floating TIP button should appear nearby the caret. Try entering or editing text via the floating TIP.

I intentionally didn’t implement support for opening the Windows popup menu on this field because in most apps you probably don’t want a native menu appearing in your non-native look and feel driven application. At some point, I will implement a right-click context menu to provide Copy, Cut, and Paste actions. However, I will probably not implement specification of the input scope as this would definitely require a native call to Windows.

Give me Feedback, Please

Whether or not it works as expected, please let me know by submitting a comment below or but sending me a message.

If it works, I’d like to know, just to know.

If it doesn’t work, tell me more about what OS, Java implementation, and hardware you are using plus as detailed a description of what you are actually observing. It you try it, it doesn’t work, and you don’t tell me, then I can’t try to fix it.

Next Steps

If I can get some good feedback and work out the problems so that it reliably works, then I’ll pursue a generic method for floating-TIP enabling Swing applications…and do a Part 2 for this article. The approach will likely involve some sort of wrapping of the look and feel in use in order to get access to each JTextComponent as it couples itself with it’s UI.

If I can devise something reasonable, then I expect to publish the source and binaries so that the tablet community can, at least, explicitly floating-TIP enable their Swing apps.

I do acknowledge that after reaching that point, it’d be good to somehow transparently enable floating TIP for all Java Swing apps on tablets without having to change them them. I simply can’t imagine how to do this without resorting to native code or petitioning an RFE to the Java implementation. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself just yet.

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