Key Largo, Edelweiss and Caireann are finally released

September 3rd, 2007 | 12 Comments »

I’m very pleased to announce releases for the main three projects that i’m working on:

Release 4.0 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Key Largo)
Release 3.1 of Laf-Widget layer for LAFs (code-named Edelweiss)
Release 2.0 of Flamingo component suite (code-named Caireann)

The release for version 4.0 of Substance look-and-feel includes the following new features:

Six new skins: Nebula, Nebula Brick Wall, Autumn, Magma, Mist Silver and Mist Aqua.
State-aware theme transitions
Smart tree scroll
Glowing icons (buttons, option pane)
Support for JXPanel translucency
SwingX UI delegates in SwingX plugin
Border painters
New title painters: Brushed Metal, Marble Noise

Some applications may need to follow the instructions in the migration guide. The latest stable NetBeans module available here installs Substance as the look-and-feel in NetBeans 6.0 and allows playing with various skins, themes and watermarks.

Work has begun on the next releases, Lima for Substance, Foxglove for Laf-Widget and Deirdre for Flamingo.

12 Comments on “Key Largo, Edelweiss and Caireann are finally released”

1 Greg Tangey said at 12:51 am on September 4th, 2007:
Hey Kirill

Looking forward to trying it, nice to see the support for SwingX components making it to release. I’ve been playing with an SVN version for a bit now and it just makes all that stuff in my application look much nicer.

Cheers.
2 Sébastien said at 9:23 am on September 4th, 2007:
Hello,

Thanks again for your amazing work with Substance, I love it as many others do.

Thanks! :)
3 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 9:35 am on September 4th, 2007:
Greg, Sebastien,

Thanks for the kind words.
4 miso said at 11:49 am on September 4th, 2007:
hello,

looks nice… but performance is not so good…
5 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 12:38 pm on September 4th, 2007:
Miso,

You are right. Substance is heavier on the CPU than the core and other third-party LAFs due to its usage of advanced Java2D APIs and animations. On older machines you might decide to use another LAF.
6 Dhilshuk Reddy said at 4:10 am on September 7th, 2007:
Hello Kirill,
I do always keep myself upadated with Substance Look and Feel.
The Substance look and feel 4.0 is really good.
I liked the Nebula skin which is close to Nimbus Look and Feel.
I liked all the animations and rollover kind of stuff with Buttons,Scrollbars,Lists ,Trees.
But I want to ask you one thing which font will really be good with substance look and feel.
The font which you have used in JXErrorPane example in this page is really good.
Please suggest me some of the good fonts I can use for my Swing application with Substance look and feel.

regards,
Dhilshuk Reddy.
7 Tito said at 11:12 am on September 7th, 2007:
Another gorgeous and on-time release, Kirill – great job. A big thanks for all of your efforts – your hard work has allowed me to pretty much just drop “pretty” into my application so I can focus on making it work. You’ve really developed a great piece of software.

A wee request: I’ve been using the swingx stuff for the last few months and wonder if you couldn’t a) prevail upon those folks to come up with a bloody versioning scheme beyond their weekly builds or failing that, b) indicate in your release notes which weekly build you used for your integration testing of the substance/swingx release so we don’t have to guess which version goes with which…

Huge thanks for your quality creations and best wishes!
8 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 11:18 am on September 7th, 2007:
Dhilshuk,

Starting from a few versions back, Substance adopted the font lookup module from Looks that tries to match the font family and size to the desktop settings. Under Windows XP, it will use Tahoma 11. Under Windows Vista it will use Segoe UI 12 (what you see in the JXErrorPane screenshot). Under Mac, it will use Lucida Grande 13. It will also honor the desktop DPI, scaling the fonts as necessary. If you’re writing custom components or application that uses Substance, you can use the GetFontPolicy API [1] to query the current font set and use the relevant fonts. Or, you can query the UIManager font entries (such as Label.font, Panel.font and so on).

Thanks
Kirill

[1] https://substance.dev.java.net/docs/api/GetFontPolicy.html
9 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 11:20 am on September 7th, 2007:
Tito,

Thanks for the nice comments. As to your request on SwingX – i have raised this issue at this year’s JavaOne SwingX BoF and Richard (SwingX lead) has talked about milestone schedules and such. I guess it’s the lack of time and administrative efforts… As to the version that Substance is tested against – open the manifest.mf of substance-swingx.jar. It has the build stamp of Substance and the build stamp of the relevant daily drop of SwingX.

Thanks
Kirill
10 Look and feel related news said at 3:44 pm on September 7th, 2007:
[...] is witnessing a more-than-usual level of activity in the look-and-feel department. In addition to my own announcement on the release 4.0 of Substance, there are two other [...]
11 Pedro Duque Vieira said at 6:45 am on September 13th, 2007:
Really great work on substance! If performance was faster I think you could rule the world with this library.=)

I’ve been trying to see what’s new on Flamingo 2.0 but can’t find. I’m particularly very interested on the JRibbon Component.

Too bad JRibbon development seems to have been dropped. =( I use this component largely on my application, can’t understand why there seems to be soo little public interest.
12 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 9:51 am on September 13th, 2007:
Pedro,

There have been some performance degradations in 4.0 release, especially on buttons and scrollbars. These have been addressed in the 4.1dev drops. If you are willing to provide more information, you’re more than welcome to contact me through the project forums, mailing lists and private e-mails.

I do have plans to improve the visuals of Ribbon under Substance. Hopefully this will be done in the 4.1 timeframe.

Thanks
Kirill