I work with the system specific look and feel and I have a form with a tab.
Within that tab I aligned everything nicely to fit into that tab on OS X 10.2. Didn’t test anything on windows and linux yet but…
Now I move to 10.3 last evening and everything is located a little different. Only pixels but still, it is the difference between a good (in my huble opinion) design and an acceptable design.
I can imagine I am going to bump into the same issue with windows and linux.
We can lock controls into four different directions of the forms but one doesn’t want to do that all the time.
Is the only solution to place and size controls based on the noticed platform or is there another way since that is a-lotla-work…
That’s one of the consequences of all the look and feels. Each look and feel has its own laws to which the gui tries to adjust. If you want to make your look and feel pixel correct then the only solution is to use an operating system independent laf like Kunstoff, unfortunately Apple does not support non-Apple lafs very well in their current Java release (not sure if that is better in 10.3)