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

• Alexander Potochkin continues his work on the advanced overlay functionality. His latest entry describes a solution for disabling Swing containers, including blocking mouse events, focus transitions and keyboard actions. While the proposed solution uses a clever trick (calling JComponent.print() instead of JComponent.paint() to address the double-buffer quirks on some containers), you’ll find some interesting discussion in the comments section. Some applications will result in incorrect painting on components that provide custom implementation of print() and the specific print methods like printComponent().
• Ben Galbraith kicks off an interesting discussion on the quality of AWT font rasterizer. I don’t agree with his recommendation of choosing the UI font based on the rendering quality (especially since the quality is very subjective). If anything, the font family, size, style and rasterization is what makes Swing applications stand apart (and not in a good way) from the native applications, even more than colors and skins do. This is why the native text rasterizer is so important, especially coupled with platform-specific font policy lookup.
• Jeff Friesen writes an overview of the Balloons Tip project at java.net.
• Patrick Gotthardt announces the first beta drop of version 1.1 of Pagosoft look-and-feel.
• Vincent Cobra announces his new project that aims to provide a file chooser component based on the Apache Commons VFS library.