New Magellan skin for Swing applications

September 8th, 2009

In addition to the usual bug fixes and getting the internal implementation ready for the changes coming in the next major release, Substance 5.3 (code-named Reykjavik) will introduce three new skins. The first is Magellan which is based on the design of the Ballpark website (found via Hongkiat) and is reminiscent of the vibrant colors of the Windows XP taskbar ans Start menu.

To use it in your application, you have the following options:

  • -Dswing.defaultlaf=org.jvnet.substance.api.skin.SubstanceMagellanLookAndFeel
  • UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new SubstanceMagellanLookAndFeel())
  • UIManager.setLookAndFeel("org.jvnet.substance.api.skin.SubstanceMagellanLookAndFeel")
  • SubstanceLookAndFeel.setSkin(new MagellanSkin())

Here are a few screenshots that show this new skin. A small frame with a tabbed pane and a few different controls:

Highlights on selected items in lists and trees:

A frame with menu bar, tool bar and status bar from SwingX project:

A thumbnail of the main Substance test application (click for full-size view):

Error dialog from SwingX components:

Login dialog from SwingX components:

A few sliders:

As with all Substance core skins, this is work in progress and will be polished over time. The Magellan skin will be officially available in the next few days as part of the 5.3 release candidate.