The previous teaser post showed a small video with “ripple” effects – an application showing a ripple overlay with waves originating on mouse click, bouncing off component borders and decaying over time, along with the superposition effects. It gives me a great pleasure to announce the first alpha drop of the Strider project (code-named Alento), that will provide these effects to Swing applications.

It provides a custom glass pane that can be installed and configured in the following way:

private RippleGlassPane rgp;

this.rgp = new RippleGlassPane(getRootPane());
this.rgp.ignoreClicksOn(JTextComponent.class, true);
this.rgp.markAsMedium(AbstractButton.class, true);
this.rgp.markAsWall(JTextComponent.class, true);
this.rgp.setOpaque(false);
this.setGlassPane(this.rgp);

The following RippleGlassPane methods can be used in the application code:

• ignoreClicksOn – mouse clicks on the specified components will not result in a ripple wave.
• markAsWall – bounds of the specified components will be marked as walls, resulting in ripple waves bouncing off.
• markAsMedium – area of the specified components will be marked as medium, resulting in ripple waves propagating slower.

The current drop is in alpha stage, lacking a few features (proper support for resizing and granularity). It’s very small (about 28KB, and unlikely to gain much more as the development continues), and can be used in any Swing application. It should be noted that it’s quite CPU intensive, since the entire wave simulation is done in software.

Once again, thanks to Paul Falstad who donated the original code under the BSD license. Stay tuned for more.