Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• Probably the biggest news of the week come from the latest b12 drop of JDK 6.0 update 10. As reported earlier, it provides support for native text rasterization on Windows, as well as translucent and shaped windows. This thread from java.net forums has more information on the native text rasterization, and the earlier blog entry describes the APIs to create translucent and shaped windows. Don’t skip the comments section that has quite a lot of additional information on performance and pixel-level translucency (for soft clipping shaped windows, for example).
• While these two features are in the latest development builds of 6u10, a lot of applications can benefit from this functionality in JDK 5.0. The native text rasterization is available under Substance look-and-feel and its Bramble plugin (using SWT), and Christophe writes about using JNA for pixel-level translucent windows.
• Jan Haderka writes about the latest stable 0.9.2 release of SwingX component suite library. The SwingX team has been very active lately, fixing a lot of bugs and providing very swift and professional response to user queries. Hope it won’t take too long before the official 1.0 release (JavaOne anyone? :) )
• On a related subject, Thierry Lefort continues to explore the SwingX components. His latest entry shows how to combine the JXTipOfTheDay component with Rome RSS parser to display an RSS feed as a tip of the day.
• As a “challenge” from one of Thierry’s earlier entries, Jeanette Winzenburg (the mastermind behind quite a few SwingX components) explores the renderer and highlight capabilities of the JXTable component.
• Patrick Gotthardt has announced the official 1.1 release of the Pgs look-and-feel.
• David Qiao of JIDE has announced the 2.2.2 release of JIDE components. I really wish that they had time to maintain an active blog to showcase the new features as they are made available. While the latest entry on rotating icons is quite useful, the previous “real” one was back in December. And on a related note, David will hold a birds of feather session at this year’s JavaOne. The topic is “Workaround Swing bugs” and he is looking for feedback on the bugs you would like to be discussed.
• Andres Almiray continues making the graphics development easier for Groovy heads. This week he takes a stab at balloon shapes, multiline text and text alignment.