A Swing Chess Clock at Thursday, February 25, 2010

I decided to have a look at the NetBeans IDE as it is now available in the Ubuntu repo'. I'd heard it has a very good GUI designer tool so wanted a small project to try it out on.

Son #2 has been getting into Chess lately and I was going to buy him a chess clock so that we could play 'blitz chess' however I thought that a chess clock would be a nice simple application to try out the NetBeans GUI tool on.

Here's the result.

 

The application has three simple spinners to choose hours, minutes and seconds. Once the clocks are started the only active control is the button that switches players. 

Over the two evenings that I spent creating the application and tinkering with NetBeans features I was very impressed with it. Everything was super intuitive including connecting to my Subversion repo and using the designer tool. It had a very low memory foot print too (~150Mb).

Next step is for the chess clock is to package it as a Java Web Start project and maybe convert it to a Midlet.

To implement the clock thread I used a Java Timer and TimerTask class which made things very neat.