Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• James Williams has a tongue-in-cheek list of five tips to tame Matisse layouts. This resonates with my earlier post on JBuilder and getting locked to an IDE that enforces any non-standard logic on the UI code that it creates.
• Luan O’Carroll writes about distributing a WebStart application via CD-ROM, expanding on such subjects as WebStart cache, not relying on existing JRE installations, working with no Internet connection and others.
• Build 27 of 6u10 is out and it addresses the issue that prevented applications from using the Synthetica look-and-feel. It also features performance improvements for Nimbus (about 8% as measured in the dynamic performance suite from the LightBeam project). Although not official, we can expect the release candidate of 6u10 this week.
• Ken Orr writes about a custom implementation of placard button commonly found in Mac applications.
• Alexander Potochkin introduces yet another useful feature of his JXLayer project – ability to lock (disable) the entire Swing container, including blocking any user interaction with its children.
• The “Ask the Experts” session on 6u10 is over, and (much like two years ago), i had a question that was not addressed. I will be polite and blame the intratubes, but the topic at hand will be a subject of a forthcoming entry.