Right-to-left support for rich tooltips in Flamingo 5.0

March 27th, 2010

The command button component is a central building block for the Flamingo component suite. It aims to address the deficiencies of the core Swing button components, adding features expected by the modern applications. While the main goal of Flamingo is to provide a pure Java implementation of the Office 2007 ribbon container, the command buttons can certainly be used outside the ribbon.

Just as command buttons can be used as drop-in replacement for core Swing buttons, rich tooltips are the extension of the core tooltip functionality. Rich tooltips provide support for main and footer areas, multi-line and multi-section content, as well as embedding main and footer images – all of these are optional and can be combined together freely. While the previous entry talked about providing right-to-left (RTL) support on command buttons and related containers, the latest 5.0dev drop of Flamingo (code-named Imogene) extends this support to rich tooltips.

The first screenshot shows a command button with action and popup areas. Both areas have associated rich tooltips, and the mouse is over the action area. The current locale is en_US:

https://flamingo.dev.java.net/release-info/5.0/tooltip-ltr-action.png

And here is the same button / tooltip under iw_IL locale:

https://flamingo.dev.java.net/release-info/5.0/tooltip-rtl-action.png

The same button has a different rich tooltip for the popup area under en_US locale (no main image and only one paragraph in the main section):

https://flamingo.dev.java.net/release-info/5.0/tooltip-ltr-popup.png

and the same button / tooltip under iw_IL locale:

https://flamingo.dev.java.net/release-info/5.0/tooltip-rtl-popup.png

This is the next step towards full RTL support in all Flamingo components. Stay tuned for more. To test the new functionality in your applications, you will need the following:

Note that the last two are required if you’re running your application under one of Substance skins – such as Office Blue 2007 used in all the screenshots in this entry.