We’ve just finished presenting our Birds-of-Feather session on high resolution monitors. Thanks to everybody for coming at such a late hour, and thanks to Mike for presenting this session with me. To all of you who attended but want to see the slides once again, and to those of you who couldn’t attend, here are the slides:
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
I have the honor to be joined by Mike Swingler (Swing / AWT lead for Apple VM) and to present an evening session on high resolution monitors at this year’s JavaOne. This has been in making since even before last year’s conference, and i am grateful to Jeff Dinkins that put me in touch with Mike.
Here is a short overview of what we’re going to talk about:
- Introduction – general overview of the field, including terms (pixels, points and in between), a few examples of high-resolution monitors and the reasons why this matters.
- Broken applications – visual artifacts in mainstream applications running in high resolution mode on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu Gnome and Mac OS X.
- Scaling modes – three main modes that different UI toolkits (such as WPF and Cocoa) provide for scaling the UIs. Each one has its advantages and requirements from the UI developers.
- Testing your app – how to test your application under high resolution mode on the usual displays.
- Swing tips – things to do if you’re developing a Swing application.
Mike brings in his expertise from the framework perspective (and very interesting things available in Leopard for both Cocoa and Swing), and i will be talking about the low-level details of scaling application visuals, touching on such subjects as icons, control visuals, layout metrics and more. If you’re interested in this topic, please join us next Tuesday at 9:30 PM. The session number is BOF-5037 and it will be held in Hall E 135. See you then.
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
- Richard Kennard has announced release 0.43 of his Metawidget project. Geertjan Wielenga picks this up on the DZone, and Dieter Krachtus has engaged in an architectural discussion on the project. Richard also shows how Metawidget can emit JIDE components.
- Jan Erik Paulsen vents his frustration with some of the Swing pain points, including layout managers, audio / video support and JavaFX design tools vision. Over the past year Jan Erik had a number of very interesting projects, including Capture, Photoshop Express and Amanda, and it looks like the topics above have hindered the progress of these projects to some degree.
- Eugene Toporov announces release 1.0 of commercial JxBrowser library for embedding Mozilla Firefox browser into AWT / Swing applications.
- Ingo Maier announces release 0.1 of scala.swing, an event based library for building Swing applications in Scala.
- Jacek Furmankiewicz continues his explorations of Java builders for Swing layouts, and it looks like this approach strikes a chord with his readers (see followup by Andres Almiray).
- Continuing the trend of Swing as a “UI virtual machine” for JVM-based dynamic languages, Greg Trasuk experiments with project JyMatisse that allows using Jython as the backend for Matisse-generated forms.
- And finally, Christophe Le Besnerais has published a Swing component for cropping images. The ability to install a custom filter (illustrated by grayscaling and blurring the outside of the cropped area) is especially impressive, and my only concern is using JLayeredPane as a base class. Perhaps using JPanel with OverlayLayout can be a simpler solution?
