It gives me great pleasure to announce the third major release of Radiance. 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:

Substance

• 😻 New skins – Nebula Amethyst, Night Shade and Graphite Sunset
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for disappearing internal frame title pane buttons
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for crash during initialization
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for OutOfMemoryError on sliders with large model ranges
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for slider tracks under dark skins
• 💔 Fix for incorrect tracking of state-based alpha values in color scheme bundles
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for drop shadows under some skins
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for contrast ratio of highlighted content under Sahara skin
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for antialiased rendering of pasted text content

Flamingo

• 😻 Keyboard traversal of ribbon content
• 😻 Keyboard traversal of command button popups
• 🤷‍♀️ Command button popups can now be dismissed without activating any action

Trident

• 😻 DSL for Trident
• 🤷‍♀️ Fix for combining looping timelines with .fromCurrent()

Photon

• 😻 Extended transcoding support for <image>, <marker>, <pattern> and <text> elements

The first Radiance release focused on bringing all the different Swing open-source projects that I’ve been working on since 2005 under one roof. The second Radiance release was about making them work much better together. And this one (code-named Coral) is about covering major functionality gaps that were missing up until now.

There’s still a long road ahead to continue exploring the never-ending depths of what it takes to write 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 third Radiance release for a spin. Click here to get the instructions on how to add Radiance to your Gradle / Maven / Ivy / Leiningen / Bazel builds. And don’t forget that all of the modules require Java 9 to build and run.

I don’t do this often, but I simply can’t let this pass without sharing. No idea how this car looks like in real life without all the color post-processing, but this (presumably light green) Rolls Royce is a magnificent creature.

This happened during the testing phase of the short-lived Nexus Q (back around early 2012 probably). I placed the unit in my home office and connected it to a pair of speakers. As Q was controlled via Galaxy Nexus, I put it on the bottom shelf of my printer stand. What was the bug you ask? Every time I started printing a page, a few seconds later Q’s volume went to the max.

As some of you may remember, the top dome of Q controls the volume. The printer stand I bought wasn’t overly sturdy and would wobble a bit when the printer was printing. The wobble wasn’t enough to cause dome rotation (you can see the sticker I put on Q to look at the rotation), but just enough to have one of the shakes spike something inside Q to turn the volume all the way up. Most of the shakes looked to be blocked by some kind of a stabilization mechanism around, but that occasional shake had just the right combination of amplitude and frequency to get through.

I don’t think that anything happened with that bug report, although a few people had a good laugh or two joking about minor California earthquakes jolting all Q’s to max volume. Not that that ever happened as the device was discontinued shortly after it was announced.

I’ve been fascinated by this story ever since John Carreyrou started untangling its web of lies a few years ago. His book “Bad Blood” came out last year. ABC’s multi-part “The Dropout” podcast was released earlier this year. A new documentary airs on HBO tonight. And at some point in 2020 there’s a movie with Jennifer Lawrence playing Elizabeth Holmes.

You can see it as a story about a misunderstood genius who, against all odds that the heavily regulated environment threw at her, tried to push for a tremendous innovation in the field of blood testing. You can also see it as a story about a misguided idealist who was willing to lie through her teeth as her carefully crafted house of cards started collapsing with absolutely nothing she could show the world – or even her investors – that could back up her crazy dream.

We need the crazy innovators who are not willing to play by the rules of old industries. But we also need some educated adults in the room that should provide guidance on why those, perhaps outdated rules, are there to begin with.