Advanced animations on core Swing components – part IV

July 16th, 2007

This is the fourth part in the ongoing series about advanced animations on core Swing component built-in to the latest binary drops of Substance look-and-feel.

  • The first part showed rollover and selection background animations on menus, sliders, tables and table headers
  • The second part showed rollover foreground animations on menus under a skin that uses dark background fill on menubars
  • The third part showed rollover and selection background and foreground animations under a mixed dark-light theme

This part demonstrates the animations under the new Magma skin. Unlike other mixed dark-light skins (Nebula, Nebula Brick Wall and Business Black Steel), pretty much all animations under Magma feature dark-light transitions for both background and foreground colors. Here is a sample video that shows animation effects on buttons, toggle buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons (note that for the later two, the foreground is not animated):


The next video shows rollover animation effects on Magma sliders:

The last video shows a complex rollover animation effect on Magma tabs. Substance provides support for tab close buttons. When installed, Substance shows the close buttons on the currently selected and the currently rolled over tab. On rolled over tabs, the close button is faded as the mouse moves over the tabbed pane. For Magma, this means that the close button animation has two channels – during the fade in, the color fades from white to black, and the alpha fades from 0.0 to 1.0. During the fade out, the color fades from black to white, and the alpha fades from 1.0 to 0.0. The video shows the rollover animation sequence under very slow animation speed so you can follow this effect:
You can run a test WebStart application by clicking the button below. The application is signed and requires read-only access to the local disk (for the filetree). In order to switch to Magma, go to the Skins menu and select “Magma”.