Substance goals for 2009

January 6th, 2009 | 12 Comments »

A clear and well-defined set of goals is crucial for projects of all sizes, and Substance is no exception. The project goal has been refined and refocused to guide the project throughout the year 2009 and is:

To provide a rock solid, fast and extensible library for creating visually appealing and consistent Swing applications

To provide a little bit more details:

  • Rock solid – the goal is to continue providing production-quality collection of skins with foremost focus on handling bug reports and maintaining long term health of the source code base.
  • Fast – the goal is to continue focusing on the performance aspects, making sure that code changes do not introduce any performance regressions and continuously analyzing the existing code paths for additional performance improvements. Project LightBeam is an integral part of the development process, which has already seen an average additional improvement of 3.3% in version 5.1dev as compared to the latest stable 5.0 release.
  • Extensible – the goal is to provide a focused and powerful set of APIs to create and tweak custom visuals as mandated by the design mockups of specific applications. Documentation on Substance skins, painters and the sample blueprints provides detailed information on how to use Substance to implement even the most demanding modern designs.
  • Visually appealing – the goal is to provide a selected collection of core Substance color schemes, painters and skins that can be used without any change in application code. Each core skin pays close attention to visual polish and the current desktop configuration, including font and DPI settings.
  • Consistent – the goal is to enforce visual consistency across different UI areas. The grouping of visual aspects based on component states, decoration areas and the newly added color scheme associations facilitates richness and flexibility between the different UI areas, at the same time enforcing visual consistency and connections across the components in related areas and states.

These five areas will be the main driving factors behind the continuing development of Substance look-and-feel in year 2009.

12 Comments on “Substance goals for 2009”

  1. 1   The Ribbon Sucks by Schauderhaftes said at 1:50 pm on January 8th, 2009:

    [...] users like me really happy make your menus searchable. In Java you can do that really easy with the substance look and feel it creates a search box for searching the menus all on its own … really [...]

  2. 2 John said at 5:19 am on January 9th, 2009:

    Kirill,

    Good to see the goals – personally, the consistency is important to me in UI design.

    Keep up the good work.

    John

  3. 3 Clemens Eisserer said at 11:22 am on January 9th, 2009:

    Keep up the good work, thanks for LightBeam :)

  4. 4 Aleix said at 11:29 am on January 9th, 2009:

    Thanks for that fantastic l&f Kirill !!

    I love the resolution independence !!!!!

    thanks for your nice work !!

  5. 5 Daniel Leuck said at 8:03 pm on January 10th, 2009:

    These goals are spot-on. Keep up the great work!

  6. 6 Marco Hunsicker said at 6:22 am on January 11th, 2009:

    Your work is fantastic! Substance is a great source of inspiration when it comes to Java UI fidelity and your blog is always worth a visit.

    The one thing that I don’t like about Substance is its visual appearance. You seem to be mostly Windows centric, which is not a bad or unexpected thing, given that this is by far the most popular choice among end-users.

    Still, I would really love to see some stunning visuals that work great on other platforms as well. I don’t know whether there is any interest in the community, but I would certainly be willing to donate some cash to provide funding for a professional designer. I have no idea what that would cost, and whether you could raise enough funding, but maybe it would be worthwhile to ask your fellow readers.

    Anyway, thanks very much for your work. All the best to you and your family.

  7. 7 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 3:10 pm on January 11th, 2009:

    Marco,

    I would be interested to have you subscribe to the Substance “users” mailing list and provide a little bit more information on what do you think can be improved in Substance skins running on non-Windows platform. My access to Ubuntu is quite limited, and i don’t have any access to Mac, so it would be interesting to hear what the “immersed” users of these desktops consider to be good visuals.

    Substance skinning layer is in a constant state of development, bringing more control over creating even the most demanding modern visuals. You can see how the core skins are implemented (Office Blue is pushing the envelope as far as the features go), and experiment with implementing your own custom skin. You can also send pointers to what you consider to be good skins to have in either the core Substance package, or as sample add-ons. Having a professional designer create design mockups for one or more of the skins is quite welcome, and you can gauge community’s interest on the Substance “users” list.

    Thanks
    Kirill

  8. 8 Alois Cochard said at 12:51 am on January 12th, 2009:

    Hello,

    I personally use Substance for application running on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu with Gnome) and my applications don’t look crappy at all.

    But some improvement can be useful, for sure.

    Thanks to develop this fantastic L&F.

    Alois

  9. 9 Niraj said at 5:08 am on January 12th, 2009:

    please fix this bug too
    http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4748141

  10. 10 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 9:14 am on January 12th, 2009:

    Niraj,

    I’m not sure what Substance has to do with memory leaks in the core Swing library.

    Thanks
    Kirill

  11. 11 Cameron Gorrie said at 10:30 am on January 15th, 2009:

    Kirill, thanks for your hard work on Substance. I found it a few weeks ago and I’m using it as the skin for my personal project. I too am mainly a Ubuntu user and find that substance works very well under the platform (other than the text rendering, which is still very lacklustre and quite obviously not Substance’s fault).

    One question I had, and I figured I’d just post this somewhere on your blog because I couldn’t decide on where else to, is: what is a good way to create the look for custom swing components? I want to inherit as much as possible of the style of the current Substance skin I’m using, but I don’t know what objects to delegate to.

  12. 12 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 5:56 pm on January 15th, 2009:

    Cameron,

    If you do not find the information you’re looking for by following the “Learn” link from the main project page, please subscribe to the project’s “users” mailing list and continue the discussion there.

    Thanks
    Kirill