Substance 4.3 official release

April 14th, 2008 | 22 Comments »

It gives me great pleasure to announce the official release for version 4.3 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Nairobi). The list of new features includes:

It was on this day in 2005 that Substance project has been created. It is now three years old and to celebrate this occasion i have redesigned the main project page to be less cluttered and a little better organized. Hope that you like it, and if you have any comments, i will be more than interested to hear your opinion.

A few screenshots of the new functionality in Substance 4.3:

New decoration painters applied to the Flamingo ribbon component:

Highlight painters on table (note a single-line border separators):

Colorized visuals of disabled selected buttons:

A button with 72 pixel font:

Click on the button below to launch a signed WebStart application that shows the available Substance features.

The sources and binaries are available on the project site and the CVS repository.

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22 Comments on “Substance 4.3 official release”

  1. 1 Andrey said at 8:11 pm on April 14th, 2008:

    Tried it on my MacOS X Leopard box – first of all – it is SLOW! I love the interface, but not when i spot all the phases of drawing the button.
    The second point – horizontal scrolling doesn’t work. I feel urge to test this =)

  2. 2 sola said at 12:34 am on April 15th, 2008:

    This is a really nice look and feel, good job Kirill! My favorite is the Sahara skin.

    I also think that it is slow sometimes. I am working on Ubuntu Gutsy and the “Mixed Buttons” pane often renders in 3-4 seconds (interestingly, only first time and when you leave it for a while and go back.

    However, Substance seems to be absolutely ready/usable for not overly complex GUIs

  3. 3 Thierry said at 1:39 am on April 15th, 2008:

    Tried it on a Windows PC and it is a bit slow too, not as slow as described by Andrey, I don’t spot all the phases of drawing the button, but still.

    And about the auto-scrolling, it works only if I click directly in the viewport of the scrollpane but it does not work if I click on the mouse wheel over a component in the view port. Is there a way to listen to the mouse wheel click event in a container and all it’s children, like with the keyboard events?

    Great work !

  4. 4 Jens Schauder said at 3:15 am on April 15th, 2008:

    Really nice, yet I have one question: Is it possible to choose a Theme/Skin based on the System settings? For example I have my Windows XP Desktop set to the color scheme “olive green”. The sahara theme integrates really nice with this, but if someone uses the windows default colors something blueish would be much nicer.

  5. 5 Alexander Potochkin said at 3:18 am on April 15th, 2008:

    Congratulations Kirill!

    Did I tell you that Substance LaF is my favourite one?

    alexp

  6. 6 Carl Antaki said at 5:00 am on April 15th, 2008:

    Congrats Kirill on this great work!

    Carl

  7. 7 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 11:08 am on April 15th, 2008:

    Everybody, thanks for the comments. It is much appreciated.

    I am aware of the performance issues. In my benchmarks (which will be part of the next release) on Windows, the rendering speed is about 6-7 times slower than Metal. I don’t have access to Mac environment, so i can’t comment on “seeing all phases of button drawing”. Talking specifically about the Substance test applications, there are two things that should be mentioned:
    1. The “mixed buttons” tab is an extremely heavy load. It creates hundreds of complicated mixed themes, and the first repaint is indeed slow (as all the themes and gradients are computed). However, it is highly unlikely that a real UI will have hundreds of different mixed themes on the same screen. So, it’s mainly for debugging purposes.
    2. The “big button” tab is an example of extremely large button. Rollover animations are slow at the first animation cycle (as every image is computed and cached) and indeed you can “see” every animation phase. If you have a UI with a single 1000*800 button, you might want to turn off Substance animations.

    The auto-scroll is indeed only on clicking in the “unpopulated” area. This is most certainly by design as you don’t want to consume potentially action-triggering mouse clicks from the controls. You can see how different browsers (IE, Firefox) provide pretty much the same behavior. It is possible to achieve the behavior that you are describing by installing an AWTListener to trap all mouse events. Christopher (author of auto-scroll module) and I agree that this is not going to be a part of the core library.

    Last question about integrating with the Windows theming system. I do not intend to provide a replacement for Windows look-and-feel. If this is your requirement, your application will need to monitor the changes to the native theme and choose the appropriate core / custom Substance skin. Note that you will need to consider that some of the desktops are using custom themes (such as supplied by WindowBlinds).

    Thanks
    Kirill

  8. 8 tito said at 11:56 am on April 15th, 2008:

    Congratulations on yet another great step forward, Kirill!

    A question on the performance: how does this version compare to the prior version from a performance perspective?

  9. 9 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 12:04 pm on April 15th, 2008:

    Tito – there should not be any performance hit as compared to the 4.2 release. The performance area will be one of the most important things for the next release.

    Thanks
    Kirill

  10. 10 Jens Schauder said at 6:27 am on April 16th, 2008:

    Sorry for hijacking your forum for this, but I can’t see an option to post in the project forum and the issue tracker times out … So feel free to move it.

    I think I found a bug. When when showing and closing a JInternalFrame twice, one gets a NPE on the second closing.

    ***** The rest of the bug report has been submitted to the Substance issue tracker *****

  11. 11 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 8:16 am on April 16th, 2008:

    Jens,

    To post to the project forums, you need to have an Observer role. I have moved your report to the issue tracker – didn’t see any timeouts this morning.

    Thanks
    Kirill

  12. 12 Marcelo Fernández said at 10:48 am on April 16th, 2008:

    About the “slowlyness”… well, I’m running Ubuntu 7.10 (with JRE 1.6 from the repositories), and yes, it is awfully slow here too (changing the LaF to Metal works perfect!). Besides that, Substance is really beautiful!

    Regards
    Marcelo

  13. 13 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 11:49 am on April 16th, 2008:

    Jens, this issue should be fixed in the 4.3_02 release.

  14. 14 Jens Schauder said at 10:44 pm on April 16th, 2008:

    Quote: “Jens, this issue should be fixed in the 4.3_02 release.”

    Awesome. You sure live up to your own rules (http://www.pushing-pixels.org/?p=50)

  15. 15 Nikita Ivanov said at 9:59 am on April 17th, 2008:

    Kiril,
    We are planning to use JIDE Framework and aboslutely want to use your L&F. Are there any known compatibility issues with JIDE and your L&F.

    Great work, btw. Love the dark skins.

    Best,
    Nikita Ivanov.

  16. 16 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 10:10 am on April 17th, 2008:

    Nikita,

    The only known issue is the one documented on the Substance JIDE main page. There were a few JIDE-related issues in the past, and those have been fixed. If you run into an exception, i will be happy to fix it. Note that some JIDE components might not be consistently skinned by Substance, as i don’t provide custom UI delegates for the JIDE components (yet).

    Thanks
    Kirill

  17. 17 Nikita Ivanov said at 12:18 pm on April 17th, 2008:

    Kiril,
    Thanks for the quick turn around. Any recommendation on frameworks like JIDE we can use? I’ve used JIDE 3-4 years ago and it was just an ‘ok’ experience. I looked at Flamingo but it lacks some of the window managment feature we would like to have. Any recommendations?

    Also, we are planing on using JFreeChart and JGrpath. Any known issues with these frameworks (I mean the basic usage of them w/your L&F)?

    Thanks,
    Nikita Ivanov.
    GridGain Systems.

  18. 18 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 1:00 pm on April 17th, 2008:

    Nikita,

    It’s not really my place to recommend a framework for building complex applications. I know that JIDE has quite a few big customers, and some of their products are specifically targeting complex architectures. I think that you would be better asking on their forums. Also, note that Flamingo does not aim too high – it just fills the currently void gap in the components that it provides.

    There should be no issues with non-component based libraries such as JFreeChart, and Substance provides APIs to query the current color settings to be used to create consistent graphs, charts and other application specific visuals. And if there are any Substance-specific issues, i will be more than happy to hear about them in the project forums, mailing lists, issue tracker or a private e-mail.

    Thanks for considering Substance for your project.
    Kirill

  19. 19 Nilo J. Gonzalez said at 12:39 am on April 18th, 2008:

    Great work!

    Nilo

  20. 20 Steve Kossouho said at 2:55 am on April 18th, 2008:

    Hello,
    First, as usual, you did a great job in Substance, congratulations !
    Then, just a tiny visual inconsistency in the Flamingo Ribbon screenshot :
    The “File” menu, is too close from the separator : maybe you should add 2 pixels to the gap, to match the general text layout.
    Once again, really great job.

  21. 21 Roadmap for Substance 5 said at 10:57 pm on April 22nd, 2008:

    [...] release 4.3 of Substance look-and-feel available last Monday (and a few patch releases to address bugs since then), it is time to think about the next release. [...]

  22. 22 Gili said at 3:19 pm on May 11th, 2008:

    I think the mouse-hover animation looks very nice if you move slowly from one component to another, but it is awful if you’re moving quickly across multiple components. In the latter case the animation is distracting… maybe even choppy.

    Please take a look and try making the animation more robust for both use-cases.