Substance (Swing) Sightings Volume 1

August 14th, 2007

As the original Swing Sightings series has lost much of the energy behind it (apart from a few occasional entries on the JavaDesktop page), i have decided to start a new series that will feature screenshots of applications running under Substance look-and-feel. Obviously, not all Swing applications are running under Substance (yet, plans on world domination are currently under review), but there are still some very nice applications out there that use various Substance skins and settings to add some style and spice to their UIs.

First up is LightZone which is a very nice digital image editor. An interesting thing to note in the screenshot (click to see original size) is that this application has quite a few custom controls, all of which are skinned according to the selected Substance skin:

The next one is LinuxSampler which is a pure software audio sampler. This application uses a few custom controls as well; note how well they blend with the core Swing controls painted by Substance:

The next one is Darkstar FX that lets you prototype Java 2D renderers in Javascript. The application suite that contains this tool also bundles the Titanium look and feel that is based on one of the core Substance skins.

The last one is Ixent which provides a framework for non-photorealistic rendering.

Note that all the applications in this entry have decided to use the graphite-based skins which have been modeled after Microsoft’s Expression Blend, Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s LightRoom.

If you haven’t tried Substance in your application, you’re more than welcome to do so. The current stable release is 3.3, and the next 4.0 version (code-named Key Largo) will be released on September 3rd (release candidate August 20).