I’ve never cared for NetBeans. Historically it’s been slow, ugly, and the UI has been chock full of (what I found to be) unintuitive contrivances. With recent releases the speed has improved dramatically. The appearance has also improved; though there are still significant problems: notably a lack of antialiased fonts.

So why revisit it? Well, from what I’ve seen so far, the mobile application development support is very slick. And this 5.0 beta I’m playing with addresses some of the more glaring UI issues. The mobile application development support just might be enough for me to forgive NetBeans’ remaining flaws. After all, I use emacs normally; obviously I can live without antialiased fonts.