Image by Donnaidh Sidhe

Every month this series is tracking the latest design trends and collecting the best examples of modern web designs. Here is the list for September 2009 with almost 2000 links from 64 aggregator posts:

And if you have some extra time, here a few extra link aggregator articles for September 2009:

Gemini skin was introduced in just-released version 5.3 of Substance look-and-feel, and it is the first skin based completely on “offline” inspiration. Gemini was created from scratch in the Jitterbug color scheme editor from this image:

Gemini shoe

This is my hand holding one of my son’s shoes. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time with him lately, and these shoes are one of his favorites to drag around the house. It took me some time to realize that i really like the colors, and some more time to analyze the color combinations and translate them to the following Gemini visuals:

The black header is coming from soles, the dark blue toolbars are from the side strip, the gray footer is from the strips around the dark blue strip, and the light gray for controls is from the upper left area. And you can see where the bright yellow highlights are coming from.

Accidentally (or maybe not), a few days ago i’ve bought a couple of winter items that use very similar navy/gray/yellow color combination:

Gemini Sweater Socks

After researching the Internet for a while it appears that this color combination is quite popular now:

Gemini shoes

So there you go – just look at the everyday things, analyze what you like and why you like it, and use that inspiration in your UIs :)

Project Onyx aims to provide blueprints for animated Swing applications powered by the Trident animation library. It displays scrollable cover art for the specific artist, and allows viewing track listing for the selected album. When i first introduced Onyx a few months ago, it fetched the album information from the Amazon backend. Recently Amazon has decided to further tighten the requirements for applications connecting to its backend, and in addition to using application keys, it also requires that all requests are authenticated using signatures.

New Onyx screens

As this places even more obstacles for people interested in trying Onyx locally (or remotely, for that matter – since i don’t want to publish the keys that i was using), i started looking for an alternative backend provider. My first stop was Yahoo! Music API, but after reading the documentation i found that in addition to requiring an application key it also returns very small cover art. My next stop was Last.fm Web Services. Here, in addition to requiring an application key, the main limitation seems to be a lack of an API to retrieve the track listing for a specific album.

Finally, a helpful thread at StackOverflow pointed me to the MusicBrainz service. After reading the documentation and trying out the examples – without the need for any application key – i have migrated the Onyx codebase to use MusicBrainz. The best part is that since there is no key, Onyx can now be WebStarted by clicking the button below – just make sure that you have Java 7 installed since it uses the new Window APIs for translucent and shaped windows:

The backend connector for MusicBrainz is quite simple, and it uses the JDOM library to parse the XML responses. There are a few notable issues with MusicBrainz that still don’t make it the best choice to fetch album information from the web:

  • In general, content is user supplied and not vetted for completeness.
  • Multiple entries for the same albums – need to be filtered out based on artist/title or ASIN.
  • Track entries for some albums are named [data track].
  • Only XML format supported in replies.
  • No ability to sort results based on album attributes (such as release date).
  • Cover art is not available. Needs to be fetched using “magically” crafted URLs from Amazon.

In the next few days i’m going to move Project Granite – the SWT counterpart of Onyx – to use MusicBrainz as well. In the meantime, browse the updated Onyx code, run the demo above and enjoy the animations powered by Trident. Release 1.1 is just around the corner.

Substance 5.3 official release

September 28th, 2009

I am extremely pleased today to announce the availability of the final release or version 5.3 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Reykjavik). The release notes for version 5.3 contain the detailed information on the contents of this release which include the following:

Click on the button below to launch a signed WebStart application that shows the available Substance features.

The following sub-projects are also available:

You are more than welcome to take Substance 5.3 for a ride. Sample screenshots of Substance 5.3 in action:

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