Substance 5.1 – polishing the Office Blue skin

January 10th, 2009 | 6 Comments »

The Office Blue skin in Substance look-and-feel has already been reworked to be closer to the original Office 2007 visuals, and this work has continued over the last two weeks to provide an even better visual match.

Here is how the sample Flamingo ribbon application looked like under Office Blue two weeks ago:

and here is how it looks now:

The incomplete list of visual tweaks includes:

  • Glass subdued gradient on the title pane
  • More fidelity in glass gradients on active (rollover, selected, pressed, armed) buttons
  • More fidelity in border gradients
  • More fidelity and subdued glass gradient on the ribbon bands
  • Less contrast between text and arrow color on ribbon command buttons
  • Subdued foreground color of ribbon band footer panels
  • Better contrast between ribbon band content and ribbon band footer panel
  • Colorizing icons of disabled ribbon components

This is still work in progress, but in the meantime you’re welcome to take the latest 5.1dev drop of core Substance (code-named Panama) and the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin. Release candidate for Substance is scheduled for January 26 and the final release is scheduled for February 9.

Related posts:

  1. Reworking Office Blue skin for Substance 5.1 If you’re following my Twitter stream, you know that over the last few days i...
  2. Reworking Office Silver skin for Substance 5.1 Following the work that has been done to revisit and polish the Office Blue skin...
  3. New Office Black 2007 skin in Substance 6.1 The latest 6.1dev drop of Substance look-and-feel library (code named Trinidad) completes the collection of...
  4. Polishing the visuals of Flamingo command buttons As the name of this very blog implies, perhaps the most enjoyable part of my...

6 Comments on “Substance 5.1 – polishing the Office Blue skin”

  1. 1 Pedro Duque Vieira said at 8:37 am on January 11th, 2009:

    Hi Kirill,

    Two things I think are missing:
    - You can barely see the rollover effect over the active band. In office2007 this is much more noticeable.

    - In office 2007 borders are smoother: tab borders, band borders

    That’s just my personal opinion. The main thing to point out is that it looks great.

  2. 2 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 3:15 pm on January 11th, 2009:

    Pedro,

    There are certain limitations in what can be done for the band rollover effects so that it looks good across all Substance skins. This is certainly one area for improvement.

    Not sure about the borders – are you talking about the corner radius, colors or something else? The only big point that i can see is the corner radius of the bottom corners of selected task button. In Flamingo they are not round at all (for now).

    Thanks
    Kirill

  3. 3 Ivan said at 9:20 pm on January 11th, 2009:

    excellent work. the subtlety might be maddening to implement, but the overall impression and professionalism improves dramatically. even as a server-side coder this makes me want to write a client-side app :)

  4. 4 Sakuraba said at 12:13 am on January 12th, 2009:

    Insanely great work! Thanks!

  5. 5 Keith W said at 5:07 pm on January 12th, 2009:

    Hi Kirill,

    This looks great.

    About Jitterbug, it’s a cool name for a cool program. Have you ever tried dancing jitterbug or swing?! I recently did some classes.

    By the way, the javafx dev who goes by the alias of aNt has said that the trust dialogs of javafx (and hopefully other programs??) are being addressed. See this thread:
    http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,19589.msg156725.html#msg156725

    Best regards,
    Keith

  6. 6 Swing links of the week, January 18th | Jonathan Giles said at 7:05 pm on January 17th, 2009:

    [...] improving his flamingo JRibbon and substance projects, bringing the flamingo look and feel much closer to that of Office 2007. Behind the scenes on the mailing lists he and Andrey Eremchenko have been [...]