It’s been three years since the last Aurora release, and today I’m happy to announce its next major update.

It took a bit of time to get here, but I’m hoping it was worth the wait. The first main addition in this release is the full-featured ribbon container that provides the functionality of the Microsoft Office command bar. It supports regular and contextual ribbon task groups, regular and flow ribbon bands, application menu, taskbar, and anchored command area. It also supports flexible and configurable resizing of the content for ribbon tasks, ribbon bands, and individual ribbon content pieces.

The second main addition is the full alignment with the changes that went into Radiance in the last year. Aurora 2 uses the Chroma color system from the Ephemeral design library, which builds on the core foundations of the Material color utilities.

It introduces APIs for system tokens – info, warning, error, and success – that can be applied to any element in the UI hierarchy, like shown here for the “Sign In” button (info styling) and “Delete account” (error styling), seamlessly adapting to light and dark skins:

In addition to streamlining the painter APIs, this version adds new surface and outline painters that emulate the appearance of a 3D glass object lit from straight above, as can be seen here under the Mist Silver skin on buttons, combo boxes and other components:

Among the many other, smaller improvements in this release you will find:

• Surface and outline painter overlays – static and dynamically animated
• New determinate circular progress indicator component
• New color selector command button component
• New generic scrollable container
• Generic support for custom commands and popups
• Support customization of window title pane buttons
• More presentation options for comboboxes
• New option to mark command button panel group labels as sticky for scrolling
• Full support for radial gradients in transcoded SVG images

The next couple of years are shaping up to be quite exciting for both Aurora and Radiance. If you’re in the business of writing desktop Compose apps, I’d love for you to take Aurora for a spin. Stay frosty for more features coming in 2026!