1. VisualVM - This is a great (and seems to be indispensable) tool to do VM runtime monitoring and profiling. It runs outside of the an IDE and lets you look deep into the VM and your runninig application at runtime. The profiler is the same that is found in NetBeans and provides a hierarchical navigation and snapshot of all activities of a running application. Check it out at https://visualvm.dev.java.net/.
2. NetBeans 6.1 JavaScript Support - if you do a lot of JavaScript, then the NetBeans is for you. In the demo shown on stage, Netbeans manages to make JavaScript development as well-supported as regular Java. The IDE provides Javadoc-like support, code completion, data structure navigation, on-the-fly documentation, even code hints, etc, etc. While other IDE such as Intellij has had support for JavaScript for a while, this is the first glimpse of it on the NetBeans platform.
3. LiveScribe (http://livescribe.com) - this is not a developer tool, but rather a pen-base computing platform based on the Java Micro Edition. It records pen stroke and voice as you write. Describing it here does not do it justice, but the one demo that caught my attention was a translating demo where the presenter wrote words in one language and the pen automatically translates it into different language...
4. Sentilla, Pervasive Computing Device: Sentilla sells small computing devices meant to be used in sensor networks. Pervasive computing is the notion that everything around us will (some day) have a microchip. Companies such as sells a platform to build and deploy these devices everywhere.
5. JFugue, Music Processing Software - this open source software lets you programmatically build music players in Java. It uses a simple text base language to describe music timing, rythm, notes, sound bank, etc. With the JFugue API, you can create music in several ways including direct notation and pattern inference.
