A mildly unexpected announcement on Jasper’s blog (a little earlier than hinted previously) that leads to this page on JDK 6.0 project unveils the first binary drop of Consumer JRE, or “Java SE 6 Update N” as it will be officially known. While the previous name was very catchy, the new name is very bland and generic (really, you couldn’t go with a letter more sexy than “N”?)

The naming aside, we finally get a chance to play with Nimbus. Surprisingly, the full class name is sun.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel (why not in javax.swing?) There are a few visual glitches, as expected from early access drops. Here is a sample screenshot of an internal frame:

As you can see, while the desktop pane has a nice gradient image, other visuals still need to be improved, including the title pane main button, the title pane horizontal line and unselected enabled checkboxes and radiobuttons (they are marked as disabled and do not respond to mouse events).

It’s not clear how the community should report bugs. The feedback section points to the Swing & AWT forum, while the changelist shows that internally created bugs use the ancient and not so trustworthy bug parade.