It gives me great pleasure to announce the sixth major release of Radiance. Let’s get to what’s been fixed, and what’s been added. First, I’m going to use emojis to mark different parts of it like this:

💔 marks an incompatible API / binary change
🎁 marks new features
🔧 marks bug fixes and general improvements

Dependencies for core libraries

• Gradle from 6.6.1 to 7.1
• Kotlin from 1.4.10 to 1.5.10
• Kotlin coroutines from 1.3.9 to 1.5.0

Substance

• 🎁 💔 Extended support for themed icons with IconThemingStrategy APIs
• 🎁 💔 Combine never-paint and flat button config into BackgroundAppearanceStrategy APIs
• 🎁 💔 Support for accent background fill color
• 🎁 💔 Extend the API to retrieve all Substance skins to also contain the full class name of each look-and-feel
• 🎁 💔 Switch menu gutter fill to alpha-based API
• 🎁 💔 Unified handling of colors for drawing separators and drag bumps
• 🎁 Added API to allow using custom color schemes for option pane icons
• 💔 Renamed GENERAL decoration area type to CONTROL_PANE
• 💔 Rename StandardButtonShaper to PillButtonShaper
• 💔 Remove tooltip drop shadows
• 🔧 Fix arrow / text / mark color for pressed states under Graphite skins
• 🔧 Fix combobox arrow color for rollover states under Graphite skins

Flamingo

• 🎁 Add support for keyboard accelerators on ribbon commands
• 🔧 Fix ribbon application menu border color on skin switch
• 🔧 Fix exception on skin switch when the ribbon application menu is not shown
• 🔧 Fix for various visuals on multi-monitor setup with different screen densities
• 🔧 Fix even-odd coloring of command button panel groups
• 💔 Tweak implementation of FIT_TO_ICON command button layout manager

Trident

• 💔 Rename TridentConfig to TridentCortex

As with the earlier release 3.5.0, this release has mostly been focused on stabilizing and improving the overall API surface of the various Radiance modules. There’s still a long road ahead to continue exploring the never-ending depths of what it takes to write elegant and high-performing desktop applications in Swing. If you’re in the business of writing just such apps, I’d love for you to take this Radiance release for a spin. Click here to get the instructions on how to add Radiance to your builds. And don’t forget that all of the modules require Java 9 to build and run.