Re: What does making an application mac like mean ?

Firstly, virtually all the keyboard shortcuts you provide for some of the menu items are questionable. Shift-V for "Copy All Values"? I have yet to see any application (regardless of platform) which uses the Shift key on its own as a modifier key for a shortcut; most users would expect Shift-V to produce a capital letter V. Similarly, having Option-O as a shortcut for opening a folder looks like it was taken straight out of Windows (where it would be Alt-O). No Macintosh application will use Option as a modifier without the Command key being part of the mix — Mac users are accustomed to Option-O  producing the Scandinavian letter ø (assuming a standard keyboard layout, such as British or U.S. is used).

Secondly, Cmd-D is a somewhat outdated shortcut for deletion; I seem to recall seeing a handful of applications back in the System 7 era using it. A more modern equivalent is Cmd-Delete (Backspace), or simply Delete on its own (iTunes removes tracks from the playlist in this way).

I also can't quite understand why you have the option of saving the preferences in the File menu. Surely that is the purpose of "Save" button in the Preferences pane. At any rate, it's certainly not something you would encounter in a Mac application, and I can safely say I haven't seen it in any other OS either.

If you're going to use function keys, make sure you don't have the Command key in front of them. A little-known fact is that ClarisWorks (starting from 3.0, IIRC) had shortcuts assigned to F1 through to F4, so the use of function keys in Mac apps isn't something that should be frowned upon, though on no occasion should a shortcut making use of a function key require that the Command key be depressed.

My final qualm with the keyboard shortcuts lies in the one you have chosen with which to invoke the Help item. Sun's excuse for not allowing the question mark as a character for a keyboard shortcut is that you would normally have to hold the Shift key in order to access it. But having Cmd-/ is an unnatural substitute. It's better to do away with any keyboard shortcut rather than coming up with something clumsy like Cmd-Backslash — that's what I did in my app; I left my Help system without a shortcut.

Still on the subject of menus, your About menu requires some attention. At first glance it appears that you wired up your Preferences pane to it (especially when the word "Preferences" appears in the title bar). The About box should be a modest affair (yours takes up virtually the entire screen). You can still retain the tabs for "Info", "Licence", & "Acknowledgements", though I would, personally, have those options as buttons. You also need to kill the Cancel button. As Greg has pointed out, the presence of a Cancel button is superfluous when you have a Close control sitting in the title bar. Furthermore, About boxes shouldn't have cancel buttons to begin with.

On another note, you should be careful about where you use system beeps. Users only expect to hear them when something has gone South, and not when an operation has completed successfully...

The final thing I should point out is that you may want to look into the licence agreement dialogue which appears when the program is launched. Rather than accepting or rejecting the agreement, I can simply close the dialogue with its close box and use the program as normal. Unfortunately, for reasons known only to Sun, you cannot disable the Close control in a window, but there are ways around this. IIRC, there is a property you can set which makes the Close control inactive (though it won't appear greyed out), so clicking on it will not cause the window to disappear. A slightly different approach would be to set the JFrame so that it is undecorated. The only snag with this is that you will no longer have a title bar, which means that the window cannot be moved.

Phew! That was lengthy! I hope most of it was helpful/useful rather than longwinded ;-)

Tom