Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

NetBeans 6.0 Preview sports a number of general improvements as well as really useful such for mobile developers. Here's a rundown (copied from the site):

Editor

• Smarter code completion. The NetBeans editor is quicker and smarter, providing completions for keywords, fields, and variables. It also lists the most logical options at the top, and lets you dig down into the full options at the bottom
• Highlights. You can think of the highlights feature as an easy-to-use and more correct substitution for the editors Search. The IDE tracks the position of the caret and, based on it, highlights some parts of the code. The highlights are marked with a background color in the editor they are also put into the error stripe, which permits for having overview of the whole file.
• Better Navigation and Inspection. In addition to Highlights, the source editor lets you quickly navigate through your code with improved Navigator window organization and the Members and Hierarchy Inspectors.
• More than just code completion. With live templates and Surround With functionality, you can quickly enter commonly used blocks of code and focus on the business logic.
  

Mobility

• New Integrated UI for CLDC/MIDP and CDC development. The Mobility Preview now supports the project properties previously available only for CLDC/MIDP projects. These include project configuration support for device fragmentation, integrated obfuscation and optimization support, and multiple deployment options, all built on Apache Ant for easier coding and management.
• New game builder. Now it's easier to create mobile games with the Mobility Pack's visual editing support for the MIDP 2.0 Game API. The API supports animated sprites and the ability to arrange tiled layers into scenes.
• New Visual Mobile Designer. The Visual Mobile Designer (VMD) has been re-designed for improved functionality and usability.
• Design analysis. Design Analysis identifies unused components for removal from complex visual designs.
• New custom components. New components for the Visual Mobile Designer simplify the creation and design of mobile file browsers, Short Message Service (SMS) composers, login screens, and Personal Information Manager (PIM) browsers.
• New components for Flow Control.
• Generated code is now easier to modify.
• Re-written JSR-172 stub compiler. The new generator has support for Base64 type and is able to parse documentation from methods.
• Improved project configuration management. A new UI for the Project wizard makes it easier to add new project configurations for new mobile devices. It's now easier to create multiple builds for multiple configurations.
  

It seems to work fine with existing projects. I will test it further to see what the improvements can bring in terms of programming efficiency.