It gives me great pleasure to announce the next major release of Radiance. The two main themes of this release are:

• Expanding on the foundational work of the previous release around color tokens
• Stability and bug fixes

Let’s get to what’s been fixed, and what’s been added. First, I’m going to use emojis to mark different parts of it like this:

 marks an incompatible API / binary change
 marks new features
 marks bug fixes and general improvements

Theming

• Modernizing the API of outline painters, unlocking the ability to use thicker strokes, multiple nested outlines, custom gradients, etc.
• Revisit the lifecycle of panel-based renderers to take advantage of the new color token APIs
• A more targeted and flexible way to configure button shapes
• Tweaking the API for painting focus indication
• Tweaking the API for configuring the menu search widget
• Add component token overrides driven by system color tokens
• Add surface and outline painter overlays
• Add surface and outline painters for luminous glass look
• More flexible logic for positioning the window title pane text
• Align visuals of sliders to those of progress bars
• Fix padding and alignment of combobox arrows
• Fix issues with setting custom window title pane buttons provider during app initialization
• Fix crash in scrollable tables

Components

• Fix the sizing logic of command button popup icons under large font sizes
• Fix the text color of ribbon keytips under some skins
• Fix paddings around command button popup icons
• Fix issues with scaling the ribbon under large fonts
• Fix content alignment in the color selector popup menu
• Fix visibility of ribbon keytips in decorated mode

Radiance focuses on helping you make elegant and high-performing desktop applications in Swing. If you’re in the business of writing just such apps, I’d love for you to take this Radiance release for a spin. Click here to get the instructions on how to add Radiance to your builds.

It’s been three years since the last Aurora release, and today I’m happy to announce its next major update.

It took a bit of time to get here, but I’m hoping it was worth the wait. The first main addition in this release is the full-featured ribbon container that provides the functionality of the Microsoft Office command bar. It supports regular and contextual ribbon task groups, regular and flow ribbon bands, application menu, taskbar, and anchored command area. It also supports flexible and configurable resizing of the content for ribbon tasks, ribbon bands, and individual ribbon content pieces.

The second main addition is the full alignment with the changes that went into Radiance in the last year. Aurora 2 uses the Chroma color system from the Ephemeral design library, which builds on the core foundations of the Material color utilities.

It introduces APIs for system tokens – info, warning, error, and success – that can be applied to any element in the UI hierarchy, like shown here for the “Sign In” button (info styling) and “Delete account” (error styling), seamlessly adapting to light and dark skins:

In addition to streamlining the painter APIs, this version adds new surface and outline painters that emulate the appearance of a 3D glass object lit from straight above, as can be seen here under the Mist Silver skin on buttons, combo boxes and other components:

Among the many other, smaller improvements in this release you will find:

• Surface and outline painter overlays – static and dynamically animated
• New determinate circular progress indicator component
• New color selector command button component
• New generic scrollable container
• Generic support for custom commands and popups
• Support customization of window title pane buttons
• More presentation options for comboboxes
• New option to mark command button panel group labels as sticky for scrolling
• Full support for radial gradients in transcoded SVG images

The next couple of years are shaping up to be quite exciting for both Aurora and Radiance. If you’re in the business of writing desktop Compose apps, I’d love for you to take Aurora for a spin. Stay frosty for more features coming in 2026!

As usual, DragonCon comes to Atlanta over the Labor Day weekend. These are my personal highlights from the opening parade this year.

A little bit late to post these, but better late than never. As always, DragonCon came to Atlanta over the Labor Day weekend back in 2024. These are my personal highlights from the opening parade that year.