Making a Mac double-clickable application in NetBeans

Question

I have recently moved to a MacBook Pro, which has meant leaving my beloved JBuilder 2005 behind. Since there is no such thing any more (AFAIK) as a free JBuilder, I'm having to choose a new IDE.

I can't live with the code-formatting of Eclipse (yes, I know, it can be customised up the wazoo, but the fact that it will NOT respect my inserted returns means I can't live with it) so I'm seriously considering NetBeans.

However, I can't find any way of getting it to build a double-clickable Mac application! (I used to use XCode for this step, but it seems that XCode no longer wants to know about Java...) I cannot be the first person who's wanted to do this...can anyone help me with advice as to how to go about it?

Grateful thanks in advance

Answer 1

I had a similar issue and have moved to using Netbeans with the AppBuilder tool. Of course you need to make sure you install the latest version of the Java SDK. http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/packagingAppsForMac.html

I also did some tweaking to the Ant build.xml file so I never have to modify it and can just copy it between projects. A nice modification I added also auto builds the .app file from within the IDE during a clean compile.

<target depends="wine-version" name="-post-jar" description="Run OSX AppBundler.">
    <bundleapp 
        name="${application.title}"
        displayname="${application.title}"
        identifier="net.sourceforge.darwine.x86"
        icon="winehq.icns"
        shortversion="WineApp-1.0 | ${wine.version}"
        copyright="${wine.license}"
        applicationCategory="public.app-category.utility"
        outputdirectory="${dist.dir}"
        mainclassname="${main.class}">
        <classpath file="${dist.jar}" />
        <option value="-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true"/>
    </bundleapp>
</target>