Substance 5.2 (code-named Quebec) is going to have a few new skins. About a week ago i wrote about the new Dust skin, and today it is joined by the new Dust Coffee skin. If you want to take it for a spin, click on the WebStart button below and change the skin to Dust Coffee from the “Skins” menu:

To use it in your application, you have the following three options:

• -Dswing.defaultlaf=org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceDustCoffeeLookAndFeel
• UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new SubstanceDustCoffeeLookAndFeel())
• UIManager.setLookAndFeel("org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceDustCoffeeLookAndFeel");

While it takes most of the visuals from Dust, it changes the colors of the default decoration area to a light yellowish brown, and uses the active color scheme of the Creme Coffee. In addition, the latest 5.2dev drop brings a few contrast improvements to both Dust and Dust Coffee that address some of the problematic visuals pointed out by Andrey Eremchenko. As before, this is an ongoing process and all core Substance skins continue to be polished throughout the release cycles.

Here are a few screenshots that show the new Dust Coffee skin. A small frame with a tabbed pane and a few different controls:

A frame with menu bar, tool bar and status bar from SwingX project:

A thumbnail of the main Substance test application (click for full-size view):

As with all Substance core skins, this is work in progress and will be polished over time. In the meantime, you’re more than welcome to take the latest 5.2dev drop for a spin and leave your comments. Note that both Dust and Dust Coffee do not play well with the Flamingo ribbon component. This will be addressed in the next major Substance release tentatively planned for autumn ’09.

The third volume of Substance sightings series highlights three gaming applications powered by Substance look-and-feel. The purpose of this series is to highlight the capabilities that Substance brings to Swing applications, and you can visit the first volume published in August ’07 that featured four Swing media-oriented applications, and the second volume published in April ’08 that showcased three open-source audio players.

The first application is WarForge which is a template builder for Warhammer Online. Here is a screenshot of WarForge under the dark Magma skin (click to see full-screen image):

The next application is OGame Automizer – an automated bot for the OGame intergalactic conquest online browser game. Here is a screenshot of WarForge under the Nebula skin (click to see full-screen image):

The last game is the Darkside turn-based strategy game. Here is a screenshot of WarForge under the dark Raven Graphite Glass skin (click to see full-screen image):

If you haven’t tried Substance in your application, you’re more than welcome to do so. The current stable release is 5.1, and the next 5.2 version is available in early development drops.

I’ve written about the Woopra client last July, and had its creator Elie El Khoury answer a few of my questions just before the New Year’s eve. About a week ago Elie has announced the release candidate for the new Woopra version, and i’ve had a great time ever since playing the new version and searching for the small visual details that add up to a great user experience.

You can read about the new functionality in Elie’s announcement, and here i just want to point out a few UI elements that i particularly like.

The first one is the new sidebar that provides a clear organization of the available statistics sections. The different sections are collapsible, and the overall choice of colors results in good readability even for darker background colors:

The new dashboard view provides a vibrant yet clear way to view the overall visitor count over the last two weeks and the last 24 hours. Note the translucent charts for the counts the day before (in the top chart), and the translucent overlay for the specific node under the mouse pointer:

Translucency is used in a lot of places in the new Woopra client, but its usage is well designed and placed. Here is a map view with translucent overlay showing the details of the specific live visitor (note the drop shadow of the overlay):

Here is one more screenshot of translucent content. The map has an overlay showing the visitor count broken down by the country. The overlay floats on the right border of the map, and has translucent list and opaque glassy scrollbar to scroll the country list:

Congratulations to Elie and the team on the great new functionality and excellent new looks!

Today, i’m happy to officially announce project Amber. In works over the last few weeks, it shows how to use Trident to add animations to an online interactive application that analyzes media trends. While previous demo videos showed some of Amber’s capabilities on test data sets, this high-definition video (watch in full-screen mode) shows Amber tracking the Digg tech news trends in real time.

To see Amber in action, click the WebStart button below and select one of the available Digg topics (last column):

Here are a few screenshots of Amber. The login screen (fades out on pressing the “Start” button):

The grid of story thumbnails (slide in and up):

Infotip showing story title and description (slides and fades in):

Another infotip, this time above the story thumbnail to fit in the frame:

Frequency chart of keywords in the shown entries – allows to analyze the popular topics:

The full code for Amber 1.0dev (code-named Ashberry) is available in the SVN repository, and Rémy Rakic (@lqd on Twitter) has already created a Twitter provider that allows analyzing public timelines:

To create a custom provider, take a look at the org.pushingpixels.amber.digg.DiggProvider class. One of the next blog entries will show another provider that uses the NY Times online APIs.