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.

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.

The work on Trident animation library continues, and over the last couple of weeks the following functionality has been added to the SVN repository:

• Interpolating float properties on objects other than the main timeline object
• Interpolating fields of Point and Rectangle classes
• Respecting RunOnUIThread annotation on internally chained timeline callbacks
• Proper cancelling of scheduled timelines
• Looping timeline scenarios

The following three videos previously posted on my Twitter stream use most of the new functionality:

Better implementation of infotips. Initial delay prevents infotip flickering on fast mouse move. Sliding and resizing the infotip to the new location creates visual continuity:

A new demo (in the test.CropCircles class) showing multiple looping timelines and one looping rendezvous timeline scenario running in parallel:

and the same demo with slightly different parameter settings for the crop circles demo to illustrate the capabilities and performance:

It is always exciting to see an elegant and polished desktop application, and it is doubly so when Swing is the UI toolkit of choice. Željko Ziriković is the mastermind behind Revolucion, a new Swing-based media player. And while Mikael Grev‘s initial work on his own media player has shown great promise, it hasn’t progressed to handling the real media. Željko‘s work appears to be much more complete and functional, and i’m eagerly looking forward to see the code when it is released in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, enjoy the video walkthrough (switch to full screen and HD), and click on the screenshots below.