It's the time of year when a lot of NetBeans Platform tutorials are being reviewed, revised, and rewritten. Today I'm looking at the NetBeans Platform Paint Application Tutorial.

Suddenly I remembered seeing something in a recent API Changes document about a new class, ColorComboBox. That means I can make the tutorial a lot simpler, since Tim Boudreau's external ColorChooser.jar is now superfluous. Here's what the ColorComboBox looks like:

It works perfectly. Of course, the nice thing about using that JAR was that it showed the user how to incorporate external JARs, but I'll make sure to make a note of that in the tutorial, along the lines of "If you don't like the NetBeans Platform color combobox, and would like to replace it with your own, such as Tim's ColorChooser.jar or a JavaFX color chooser, take the following steps."

In short, if you're using NetBeans APIs, write this on your ceiling above your bed: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/apichanges.html, check that page regularly (mark it in your calendar to do first thing every Monday morning) and you'll be aware of the latest changes as they happen.