I had only two things on my Java desktop wishlist for 2008 – cross-platform support for H.264 / FLV formats and converters / viewers for competing markup formats. To quote myself on the second wish
You know what i’m talking about – those pesky competitors that have 99.9% percent of the consumer-facing rich desktop market. Flash / SWF, Flex / MXML and WPF / XAML. Each has its own set of designer tools for creating rich content. Each has armies of professional designers versatile in using those tools, in addition to Photoshop, Maya and others. Do you really expect them to master yet another (unproven) designer tool?
If JavaFX wants to have a fighting chance, it needs to provide a simple migration path. A path that allows taking an existing Flex / Silverlight application and importing it to JavaFX (at least the visuals).
Is it possible that this is becoming a reality? Here is what James Gosling said to Register Developer during the Mobile & Embedded developer day:
We are putting a lot of effort into interoperability with the Adobe tools – a lot of the Adobe tools are wired into the neurons of the artists of the world, […] We are not trying to be a completely isolated island that has all the tools for everybody.
Obviously, this is completely open to interpretation and speculation, and we’ll have to wait for the grand announcement(s) at this year’s JavaOne. My read on this is that Sun will provide a set of plugins to Adobe tools that will allow exporting art as JavaFX and SceneGraph code. And instead of focusing on creating visual tools for the designers, Sun will put the effort in the programmer’s half of the tool chain.
Only time will tell…
The release candidate for version 4.2 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Memphis) is available. The list of new features includes:
Target date for release is February 4. Only defects will be fixed until this date.
In addition to the core release candidate, the following Substance plugins and modules have been updated as well:
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
- Dusan Pavlika writes about a Master’s thesis by Jan Taus on skinning Swing components. The PDF file of the thesis provides a very detailed overview of how look-and-feels work – this is definitely a good introduction for the aspiring LAF writers.
- Christopher Deckers announces release 0.92 of the native components for Swing (web browser, media player, flash viewer). This release features improved Flash player and includes support for Linux platforms.
- Simon Morris shares his views on making Swing the best platform for the desktop development in the next few years. It brings together quite a few interesting ideas, including my number one wish for 2008 (full cross-platform video support) and echoing my lament on the amount of branding that Sun puts in the Java platform. His final vision of Java embedding native controls and native controls embedding Java components invokes the work that Christopher does on his DJ project (from the previous bullet).
- Chet Haase shares more demoes from the Scene Graph project. This entry shows an iPhone-like interface (don’t you just love blurry icons with pixelated outlines? :) ), and this entry shows a few very basic demo applications. Hopefully, by the time the project is released, the demoes will match the level of sophistication found on professional Flash websites.
- Andres Almiray writes a complete step-by-step introduction tutorial to the GraphicsBuilder. While you wouldn’t find anything that can’t be done in pure Java2D, the compactness and readability of the Groovy code is very impressive. Groovy-based look-and-feel anyone?
- Dalton Filho writes a detailed tutorial for Swing developers that wish to learn the wxWidgets UI toolkit. This might be a nice addition to the UFacekit project that was mentioned last week.
- Eric Burke posts a call to action on providing a full-fledged Java counterpart of Excel spreadsheet component. Along the way, he argues that the JTable is not a good fit as a base class for such a component, and he has quite a few good points. I’m quite skeptic that somebody would be able not only to start such a project, but also to follow through on all the complexities and functionality that is provided by the latest Excel :(
- Tim Dalton updates on the bridge between Swing and Scala, posting information on the Google Code-hosted code repository for his SQUIB project.
- Two new project releases using the JIDE component suite. Designer Vista is a UI design tool that allows quick UI prototyping in a Visio-like interface. MyMoney is a financial software tool for working with online banking services.
- The Synthetica look-and-feel is used in the new release of MyUniPortal project. See the screenshots here.
I am not a professional designer, but i’m always ready to learn from people who have a finer eye and more experience than me. Last week i posted a screenshot of the newly redesigned enterprise application from Lawson (designed by frog design). As i hinted in that entry, some of the visuals are planned to be added in the next releases of Substance look-and-feel. Well, you don’t have to wait too much, at least for one of the visuals of this application.
First, here is a screenshot of the table component from that application:
and here is the table design from Nimbus:
There are a few interesting and subtle details here, all contributing towards very clean and elegant visuals of a table wrapped in a scroll pane:
- Continuity of the table border and scroll bar border
- Continuity of the table header, extending to the top-right corner of the scroll pane
- Continuity of the striped background
- Continuity of the selected background
Let’s see how such a table looked like in the previous Substance release (4.1 code-named Lima):
Non-native font rendering aside, there are quite a few problems:
- Even though the table grid is turned off, there are still white separator lines clearly visible on striped rows and especially on the selected row
- Too many lines on the table header – each cell has its own border
- Extra border to the right of the scroll bar results in additional visual noise
- The selection background doesn’t extend to the perceived table bounds on both sides
So, how does it look under the latest 4.2 drop that is scheduled to be the RC build if no bugs are found until Monday?
This addresses quite a few of the issues (continuity, borders, background, scroll pane corner component, native text rendering), and the end visual result is much cleaner. And here is the same table under right-to-left orientation:
Still few things to be addressed in the RTL mode, such as the location of the sort icon and the alignment of the default text renderers.
How does Substance fare against the competition? The same application under Nimbus from the latest 6.0u10 drop (obviously it is still work in progress):
While largely faithful to the design, there’s the off-by-pixel discrepancy where the table header meets the scroll bar, wrong foreground color of selected cells and too little vertical space for the rows (see how the icons “touch” the rows above them). The RTL mode breaks the visuals of the scroll bar and introduces more off-by-pixel’s in table header and scroll bar:
How about Synthetica? Here is the same application under Synthetica Blue Ice:
It has most of the same issues as Substance did in version 4.1, including the extra white lines on selected row, double border on the right hand side of the scroll bar, table header that doesn’t blend with the outer border and too little space on the left hand side of header cells. The RTL mode doesn’t have additional problems:
The Substance screenshots above were taken under the Nebula skin which uses some of the color schemes from the Nimbus design. Obviously, the same visual noise reduction applies to all other Substance skins. Here is the same application under the Business skin:
and the RTL mode:
These changes are available in the latest 4.2dev drop of Substance. The release candidate is scheduled for January 21st (this Monday) and the release is scheduled for February 4th. If you find any bugs, you can post a report on the project mailing lists, issue tracker or in a direct mail [kirillcool yahoo com].
