Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• Kaushik Sathupadi writes about implementing mouse gestures in Swing. Personally, i haven’t found mouse gestures to be overly useful until now, but your users might have a different opinion.
• Danny Coward, Ken Russell and Richard Bair host the “Ask the Experts” session this week on 6u10 over at SDN. Last year Two years ago i wasn’t too lucky and my questions were screened out, but things may change this year.
• Michael Gvirtzman has a new Swing application called “Golden Rules”. It allows several planning levels, actual effort tracking, mind mapping, and contact management, providing function-rich goal system for both beginners and professionals and uses SwingX.
• JavaSwing.net has a short tutorial on InputVerifier, including background on relevant scenarios and sample code.
• Business Swing applications don’t have to be ugly (especially if you’re willing to depart from Metal / Ocean), as the new round of Palantir screenshots shows.
• Clemens Eisserer is one of the chosen finalists for the OpenJDK Innovators’ Challenge with his proposal for implementing XRender pipeline for Java2D. You can follow his blog to track the progress, and this week he announced that the project itself will be hosted at java.net.
• Greg Brown has posted the second part of a practical introduction to the new Pivot UI framework.
• Matt Fletcher writes about his experiences in rolling a JRuby desktop application.
• On a related topic, Mario Aquino has two new screencasts on desktop JRuby libraries. The first screencast is on Cheri and the second screencast is on Monkeybars.

Jeff Friesen is a prolific Java desktop author on such sites as JavaWorld.com and InformIT.com, and his article on parsing .ico files and exposing the icon planes as BufferedImages. One of the areas mentioned in our JavaOne presentation on high-resolution monitors is scaling the application icons, and the org.jvnet.flamingo.common.icon.ResizableIcon interface aims to provide this support.

It was relatively easy to adapt Jeff’s code and create an implementation of ResizableIcon interface that loads .ico files and chooses the best icon plane for the specific size. The org.jvnet.flamingo.common.icon.IcoWrapperResizableIcon is the implementation and you can see how it is used in the test.imageviewer.IcoViewer.

Here is a screenshot of this application showing file icons from the Jordan Michael‘s portfolio under 128*128 size (click for the full view):

and here is the same application with the icon size changed to 256*256 (click for the full view):

The code for parsing the .ico format has been contributed by Jeff under the BSD license. The following must be referenced if you reuse this code in your application:

• Jeff Friesen name
• InformIT.com
• The original article itself.

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This week i have started working on providing Substance plugin for the JIDE common layer components. The main project page contains the overview information on using the early drops of this plugin, and you will need the latest 5.0dev drop of the core library to use the early drops.

At the present time the plugin contains the UI delegate for the JideButton component, complete with what you expect from the Substance look-and-feel:

• Full animations on rollovers, selections, press etc, including animating both background and foreground colors.
• Support for high-DPI mode, including margins, insets and borders.
• Support for decoration areas.
• Animating the text underline on rollovers over hyperlink-styled buttons.

Here is a screenshot of JideButton components under different settings (click to see full view):

Here is a short video of rollover effects over different button styles. Note the animations on the background colors, translucency and the text underline of hyperlink-styled buttons:

And here is a short video of the rollover effects under the core Magma skin. Note how the foreground colors are animated properly (including the always-white foreground on hyperlink-styled buttons that never show the background fill):

This is just a preview of the features that will be eventually available in the final plugin release. The goal is to provide the full range of Substance functionality for all JIDE common layer components.