Following the work that has been done to revisit and polish the Office Blue skin of Substance look-and-feel closer to the original visuals, the last two weeks have seen major improvements in the Office Silver skin that bring it closer to the Office 2007 visuals as well.

Here is a screenshot of the old Office Silver skin:

While the overall direction is right (grays + a combination of yellow / orange colors for active states), it quite far from the original visuals.

Here is how it looks in the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama):

To see the new Office Silver skin in action on the Flamingo ribbon component, run the following WebStart demo and switch to Office Silver in the Look & Feel task:

If you want to test new visuals and APIs, you will need to take the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama). Release candidate for Substance is scheduled for January 26 and the final release is scheduled for February 9.

Not much time has passed since i’ve announced that the Swing link of the week trail on this blog has come to an end, and Jonathan Giles has decided to step in and continue posting theweekly round-up of the Swing related news.

You can find the first entry of the year on Jonathan’s blog, and he just started twittering about it. So, you’re more than welcome to subscribe to his feed and send your links his way (he has his e-mail on the first entry).

To aid Jonathan in his weekly quest, here are a few places that i used to collect the links:

• dzone new links
• java.net blogs
• javablogs.com custom query (keyword Swing)
• java.net desktop forums
• java.sun.com desktop forums
• javaposse google newsgroup
• feeds of blogs previously features on the series

The Office Blue skin in Substance look-and-feel has already been reworked to be closer to the original Office 2007 visuals, and this work has continued over the last two weeks to provide an even better visual match.

Here is how the sample Flamingo ribbon application looked like under Office Blue two weeks ago:

and here is how it looks now:

The incomplete list of visual tweaks includes:

• Glass subdued gradient on the title pane
• More fidelity in glass gradients on active (rollover, selected, pressed, armed) buttons
• More fidelity in border gradients
• More fidelity and subdued glass gradient on the ribbon bands
• Less contrast between text and arrow color on ribbon command buttons
• Subdued foreground color of ribbon band footer panels
• Better contrast between ribbon band content and ribbon band footer panel
• Colorizing icons of disabled ribbon components

This is still work in progress, but in the meantime you’re welcome to take the latest 5.1dev drop of core Substance (code-named Panama) and the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin. Release candidate for Substance is scheduled for January 26 and the final release is scheduled for February 9.

A clear and well-defined set of goals is crucial for projects of all sizes, and Substance is no exception. The project goal has been refined and refocused to guide the project throughout the year 2009 and is:

To provide a rock solid, fast and extensible library for creating visually appealing and consistent Swing applications

To provide a little bit more details:

• Rock solid – the goal is to continue providing production-quality collection of skins with foremost focus on handling bug reports and maintaining long term health of the source code base.
• Fast – the goal is to continue focusing on the performance aspects, making sure that code changes do not introduce any performance regressions and continuously analyzing the existing code paths for additional performance improvements. Project LightBeam is an integral part of the development process, which has already seen an average additional improvement of 3.3% in version 5.1dev as compared to the latest stable 5.0 release.
• Extensible – the goal is to provide a focused and powerful set of APIs to create and tweak custom visuals as mandated by the design mockups of specific applications. Documentation on Substance skins, painters and the sample blueprints provides detailed information on how to use Substance to implement even the most demanding modern designs.
• Visually appealing – the goal is to provide a selected collection of core Substance color schemes, painters and skins that can be used without any change in application code. Each core skin pays close attention to visual polish and the current desktop configuration, including font and DPI settings.
• Consistent – the goal is to enforce visual consistency across different UI areas. The grouping of visual aspects based on component states, decoration areas and the newly added color scheme associations facilitates richness and flexibility between the different UI areas, at the same time enforcing visual consistency and connections across the components in related areas and states.

These five areas will be the main driving factors behind the continuing development of Substance look-and-feel in year 2009.