It’s finally time to release one of my favorite new skins for Swing applications. The latest 4.0dev drop of Substance provides full support for a new dark skin named Magma. Like Nebula, Nebula Brick Wall and (partially) Business Black Steel, it uses a mix of dark and light color schemes, but takes this one step further. In Magma, the default and disabled color schemes are dark, and the active (selected, pressed, armed, rollover) color schemes are light (saturated Sunset shifted to red). In addition, like Autumn, it uses the same color scheme for the default and disabled states, and defines a custom alpha value (translucency) for the disabled state. The end result (see screenshots below) is that the disabled controls appear less “visible” as the default controls. This also means that the watermark “shines through” the disabled controls (look closer at the disabled buttons in the first screenshot below).

Here are a few screenshots of different controls under the new Magma skin. Buttons, toggle buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons in different states (default, selected, disabled and disabled selected):

Comboboxes in different states (default, active, disabled, with custom background):

An internal frame with a few controls:

Horizontal and vertical sliders in different states (enabled, disabled, ticks, labels, RTL). Note the translucent layers on the disabled sliders:

Progress bars (horizontal, vertical, determinate, indeterminate, with caption):

Tree with a selected and rollover path:

A control panel with different controls embedded in a SwingX task pane:

SwingX error pane:

SwingX month view:

A frame with menubar, toolbar and status bar from SwingX:

You’re welcome to try this skin and report any issues / RFEs that you find.

This also marks the core feature freeze stage for the 4.0 version of Substance. From this point on, only the user-requested features, minor polishments and bugfixes will be done on the main trunk. Since version 4.0 introduces binary incompatibilities with the previous release, you’re welcome to follow the instructions in the migration guide in order to migrate to version 4.0 (in case your application uses Substance-specific APIs and client properties). The final release is planned for September 4th.

You can run a test WebStart application by clicking the button below. The application is signed and requires read-only access to the local disk (for the filetree). In order to switch to Magma, go to the Skins menu and select “Magma”.