What Mac Apps Use Java
iPadOS features additional technologies that take advantage of the unique functionality of iPad using the iOS SDK. With iPadOS, your iPad apps can now deliver multiwindow experiences, add full drawing experiences for Apple Pencil, and contribute fonts for systemwide use.
The first is to access web-based Java apps. This is becoming rare. The second is if an app on your Mac uses Java for something. This is still fairly common. But how to tell? Well, one way is to go to the Terminal and type: find /Applications -type f -name.jar This isn’t an accurate list of apps that use Java, but it just searches for any. Apple updates Java for Mac OS X 10.6, but hints that it's winding down its support in future versions of the operating system. Erica Ogg Oct. 21, 2010 11:38 a.m.
Multitasking
With Multitasking capabilities such as Slide Over, Split View, and Picture in Picture, users can quickly switch from one app to another with intuitive gestures.
Multiple Windows
In iPadOS, apps that support Drag and Drop can also support multiple windows. For example, users of a document creation app can work on several documents at once, use the app in Split View or in multiple spaces, and even work with multiple apps in Slide Over.
Drag and Drop
With multitouch APIs, your apps can let users quickly move text, images, and files from one app to another. Support Drag and Drop in your apps to let users move content in a way that feels natural.
PencilKit
Apple Pencil delivers pixel-perfect precision and industry-leading low latency, making it great for drawing, sketching, coloring, taking notes, marking up email, and more. Your apps can take advantage of Apple Pencil, which features an intuitive touch surface that supports double-tap gestures. And with PencilKit, the new feature-rich drawing and annotation framework, you can now easily add a full drawing experience to your app — with access to a canvas, responsive inks, a rich tool palette, and a drawing model on iPadOS.
Files and Folders
Files now supports USB drives, SD cards, and file servers. And host of new features like Column View, Quick Actions and local storage make Files even more powerful.
Fonts
With iPadOS, your app can contribute fonts for systemwide use and use other contributed fonts, offered through the new font picker interface. And new system UI fonts are now available for use in your app.
Machine Learning
With on-device model training and a gallery of curated models, there’s never been a better time to take advantage of machine learning. Core ML seamlessly takes advantage of the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine to provide maximum performance and efficiency, and lets you integrate the latest cutting-edge models into your apps. The Create ML app lets you build, train, and deploy machine learning models with no machine learning expertise required.
Augmented Reality
ARKit delivers an incredible awareness of people with the ability to integrate human movement into your app, the People Occlusion feature that lets AR content realistically pass behind and in front of people in the real world, and much more. Reality Engine — Apple’s rendering, animation, physics, and audio engine — powers Reality Composer and RealityKit, so you can easily prototype and produce AR experiences.
Desktop-class Browsing with Safari
Safari on iPad supports the latest web standards and automatically adapts websites and web apps to touch, delivering a rich browsing experience with blazing-fast performance, industry-leading security, and modern desktop features. Your site or embedded WebView can take advantage of powerful new features and coding best practices to deliver a best-in class user experience for iPad.
Building for iPad Pro
iPad Pro lets you deliver faster, more responsive experiences like never before. The all-screen design goes from edge to edge. Face ID works seamlessly in portrait or landscape. The A12X Bionic chip outperforms the vast majority of portable PCs, runs pro apps, and enables stunning augmented reality experiences. And with support for accessories like the second-generation Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard Folio, iPad Pro represents the biggest change to iPad ever.
Face ID
This secure way to unlock, authenticate, and pay lets users quickly access your app with just a glance. The TrueDepth camera projects and analyzes more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a facial map that is encrypted and protected by the Secure Enclave on the device.
For details on user authentication, see the Human Interface Guidelines.
A12X Bionic
The A12X Bionic chip with the Neural Engine is the smartest, most powerful chip we’ve ever made, and it’s been designed specifically for iPad Pro. The A12X Bionic delivers faster CPU performance than the majority of portable PCs. The Apple-designed 7-core GPU, along with architectural enhancements and memory compression enable the GPU to perform up to 2x faster. And the 8-core Neural Engine, which runs five trillion operations per second, is dedicated to highly efficient, powerful machine learning, enabling all-new experiences.
UI Optimization
Take advantage of the all-screen design of the 11-inch iPad Pro and 12.9-inch iPad Pro (3rd generation) by building your app with the iOS 12.1 SDK or later and making sure it appears correctly with the display’s rounded corners and home indicator.
Run and Test in Simulator. Make sure your apps take advantage of the edge-to-edge Liquid Retina display by respecting safe areas and supporting adaptive layouts. Read the updated Human Interface Guidelines, download the latest version of Xcode, and test your app in Simulator.
Enable full screen native resolution. Your app will run in Full Screen Display Mode on iPad Pro if your project’s base SDK is set to iOS 12.1 or later and you have a Launch Storyboard.
Verify all parts of your app. Make sure that your UI displays correctly and no elements are mispositioned, overlapping, incorrectly scaled, or clipped. If you discover issues, use the safe area guides and layout margins to correctly position UI elements.
Bring Your iPad App to Mac
Get a huge head start on creating a native Mac app based on your existing iPad app. Your Mac and iPad apps share the same project and source code, so any changes you make translate to both platforms. And your newly created Mac app runs natively, utilizing the same frameworks, resources, and even runtime environment as apps built just for Mac.
Sidecar on macOS Catalina
Users running macOS Catalina can use iPad as a secondary display alongside Mac and draw with Apple Pencil on iPad. There’s no need to make any adjustments to Mac apps — they just work.
In the past two articles you have seen how to customize your Java application so that it looks and feels more like a native Macintosh application when running on Mac OS X without changing the end user experience on other platforms. A combination of runtime properties and coding changes that targeted Mac OS X specific APIs made a big difference to that audience.
Recall that Mac OS X is a melding of two worlds. Hard core UNIX programmers can pop open a Terminal window and write their Java code using vi and compile and run it from the command line. There is, however, the more traditional Mac audience that interacts with their computer through a friendly UI that follows Apple Human Interface guidelines.
In this article, we look at deploying your Java application. The technical geek audience might be happy with running a class with a main() method from the command line but the wider audience expects a double-clickable icon that looks and acts like every other native application. In this article, we travel from one end of the spectrum to the other to broaden your potential user base.
Although you should 'test everywhere', your build machine may not be a Mac. Fortunately, as you will see, a double-clickable Macintosh application is just a directory with some special contents and a name that ends with .app. Even on a Windows machine you should be able to modify your build script to package up a Mac-specific version of your application.
Primitive Distributions
Because Mac OS X ships with J2SE 1.4.1 and J2SE 1.3.1, you can distribute your application as class files or jar files and - in theory - your customer could run your application from the Terminal application. We start with these models and quickly move to double-clickable jar files and shell scripts.
For this article, use the Java Sound Demo as the running example. Download and unzip the zip file. Inside the JavaSoundDemo directory you will find the source files inside of the src subdirectory, a jar file, audio files, and html files that we will not use.
Raw Class Files
As a developer, you don't think twice about compiling the source files and running the application using the command line. Compiling the eight files in the src directory generates fifty class files. You can then run the sample application from the command line like this.
Download Java App
java JavaSound
The Java Sound Demo starts up. We haven't customized the application in any way so the menu appears at the top of the JFrame and not where Macintosh users expect. The application looks like this out of the box.
You have done this compile and run step so many times that you hardly think twice about it. Think of the least technical person you know and ask whether they would be likely to follow these steps to run your application if a competing application were easier to install and run.
This example demonstrates two separate areas of usability. Once we got the application up and running it looked good and ran fine. You would not, however, want to distribute an application to an end user this way. You would have to somehow bundle up the fifty class files for easy download and installation. You would then have to provide instructions for running the application using, in the case of Mac OS X, the Terminal application.
Jar Files
If you are going to have to package up the class files for distribution anyways, you may as well produce a jar file. And, if you are going to produce a jar file, it ought to be executable. In the case of the Java Sound Demo, the file JavaSoundDemo.jar is executable. Because Mac OS X ships with the Jar Launcher application, the end user needs only double click on the jar file and the application will launch.
To make the jar file executable, the manifest must include the name of the Main class file. Unjar JavaSoundDemo.jar with the command jar xvj JavaSoundDemo.jar. Here's the file META-INF/MANIFEST.MF.
Shell Scripts and Helper Applications
For larger or more complicated applications you are likely to have more than one jar file along with resource files. A common strategy for targeting multiple platforms is to include a batch file and a shell script. Choose the non-platform specific download from the NetBeans homepage. Inside of the bin subdirectory you will find applications for running NetBeans on a variety of platforms.
The shell script runide.sh can be run from the command line like this.
sh runide.sh -jdkhome /Library/Java/Home
The NetBeans IDE starts up with this decidedly non-Mac OS X look and feel.
You could, of course, modify the shell script to modify this look and feel, but the NetBeans developers decided on a different approach. Even though the typical NetBeans audience member is technically competent, there should be a friendlier way to start the IDE. They have created a native Mac OS X application called NetBeansLauncher.
The version of NetBeansLauncher that is included in the generic NetBeans download is a good next step. You will see how the team took it farther in the next section. On a Mac OS X computer you can double click on the macosx_launcher.dmg file inside of the bin directory. This is a disk image. Drag the NetBeansLauncher from the expanded disk image back into the bin directory. Now double click on the NetBeansLauncher. The ReadMe file that was also in the disk image provides the following information about usage.
Apps Made With Java
When launched for the first time, NetBeansLauncher needs to find NetBeans root directory. First it looks into NetBeansLauncher.app itself. If it does not find NetBeans root directory there user must specify NetBeans root directory manually.
For this download, the first time the user starts up the NetBeansLauncher, they need to navigate to the netbeans directory. After that, double clicking on the NetBeansLauncher starts up the NetBeans IDE as if it were any other native Mac OS X application.
First Class Mac OS X Applications
If you download the Mac OS X disk image from the NetBeans distribution and mount it you may be surprised at the simplicity of what you find. Unlike the complex structure visible in the other distributions, you will see five files with documentation and a single application. To install, you can move this NetBeansLauncher application anywhere on your hard drive. Double click on it and the NetBeans IDE starts right up.
This is the experience that is expected on Mac OS X. The package structure and complexity is hidden from the user and they can't accidentally move a file that renders the IDE unusable. In this section we'll look more closely at the package structure and how to create a Mac OS X application whether or not our build machine is a Mac.
Packages in Mac OS X
Consider again the sentence from the NetBeansLauncher instructions that says in order to locate the NetBeans root directory, 'First it looks into NetBeansLauncher.app itself.' This implies that NetBeansLauncher is a directory with the name 'NetBeansLauncher.app'. In the mounted disk image, either right click or Ctrl-click on the NetBeansLauncher icon and choose to 'Show Package Contents'.
The structure is the same for all Mac OS X applications. There is a Contents directory with an XML file named info.plist, a text file named PkgInfo, a MacOS directory, and a Resources directory. If you don't have a creator code registered with Apple the PkgInfo text file should contain only the following.
If you have a creator code, use it in place of the question marks. Ordinarily the MacOS folder contains a small stub file that launches the Java VM. In this case the NetBeans team has written their own application. We will look more closely at a property list file in the next section. For now, take a look at the contents of the Resources directory.
You can see the contents of the same netbeans package inside of the Resources subdirectory. This is your key to deploying on Mac OS X. Add in the necessary pieces and then just bundle up your ordinary distribution in the appropriate location. If you have a more flexible build process you should also strip out those pieces that aren't needed for the Mac OS X application such as the Windows executables.
If you are interested in digging deeper into the structure of a Mac OS X application, you will find more information in the Apple publication Anatomy of a Bundle.
Creating 'Native' Java Applications on Mac OS X
If you develop on Mac OS X you can use the Jar Bundler application to turn jar files into Mac OS X applications. Jar Bundler is distributed with the other developer tools and is located in Developer/Applications/. Start it, select the 'Classpath and Files' tab and add the file JavaSoundDemo.jar.
Select the 'Build Information' tab. For 'Main Class', navigate to the JavaSoundDemo.jar file again and select JavaSound from the drop down list. This list is populated by any classes in the jar file containing a main() method. Accept all of the default settings for the options. You can use the default Java application icon or you can create your own. The icon you see below started as a screen shot of the running Java Sound Demo and was transformed into an icon using the IconComposer application that is also distributed as part of the developer tools.
Press 'Create Application' and enter the name 'JavaSoundDemo'. A Mac OS X application is created for you. You can show the package contents of the generated application as before. You can view the property list with Apple's Property List Editor or with any text editor. It is just an XML file with properties stored as name - value pairs.
The Java properties indicate the location of the jar file, the name of the Main class, and the version of the JRE to be used. The other properties include a pointer to the icon file and to the Java application stub file that is the native executable.
Creating Mac OS X Java Applications on Other Platforms
What Mac Apps Use Java Free
Take a look at the contents of the package that was generated by Jar Bundler on Mac OS X.
On another platform you need to duplicate this structure. To create an application named 'JavaSoundDemo' on, say, a Windows machine, start by creating a directory and naming it JavaSoundDemo.app. Next, create a subdirectory named Contents. Inside of Contents you will need a MacOS directory with the JavaAPplicationStub. You can create the PkgInfo text file and your Info.plist can also be generated by hand and should contain the following XML. Bootable windows usb mac software.
You will need a Resources directory with a Java subdirectory into which you put the JavaSoundDemo.jar file. In other words, with the exception of the JavaApplicationStub and the music.icns file, everything else can be created on another platform.
If you use Ant you can easily add a target that takes your jar files, images, and other resources and bundles it up as a Mac OS X application bundle that includes the plist file and Java application stub in the appropriate locations. Every time you create a new build you will automatically have your Mac OS X version. You can also find a growing number of Ant tasks that automate some of the steps outlined in this article.
Summary
When it comes time to deploy your Java application, consider the ease of use of your target audience. Even developers appreciate the double clickable version of the NetBeans IDE. Creating a Java application that looks and feels like a native application does not require a lot of extra work and can easily be integrated into your build process even if your build machine runs a different operating system.