This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
The text areas have a lot of gray wasted space surrounding them and they are too small for reading the text inside (especially tips area) You could either make them one cell taller (attached wp3.jpg) or move the titles to the borders and enlarging the text areas in both directions(wp4.jpg). It is also possible to only widen the text areas but that won't improve readability. wp1.jpg is the current state.
Created attachment 4002 [details] Current Welcome Panel
Created attachment 4003 [details] Taller text areas
Created attachment 4004 [details] Titles in borders, text areas bigger
Justification why this is a P2 bug?
The Welcome panel is qenerally badly written. It uses hardcoded sizes of components, don't respect user fontsize. The little text areas make it looking unusable but for this one "workaround exists(tm)" - resizing the window, so I'd agree with P3. But if you set larger font (say 20 and I've seen desktops with even larger fonts), the buttons will stay the same size so the text will not fit on them and the titles will still be using the "tiny" 12pt font which will be nearly unreadable for people using 20+pt font. I was thinking about pushing it to 3.4 but this is accessibility problem, isn't it?
Fixed in release33. Labels fonts size is not hadcoded. Also size of the dialog is not constrained.
Well, and what about design - proposed on screenshots, Jano ?
new Welcome Panel - verified
Resolved for 3.4.x or earlier, no new info since then -> closing.