As I wrote late last year, software is never quite done. And so goes yet another year tweaking the presentation layer on this very site. Back in 2014 I’ve switched to using 2x / retina images on modern screens, going back to the archives and resourcing all the images in the interviews that have been published until then. From that point on, all the interviews published here showed higher-resolution images when appropriate. And yet, that wasn’t enough.
The film medium is by its very nature a visual one. Stills from film productions, be they movies or TV shows, demand the same full-width treatment as the production itself. I’ve spent most of my summer going back to older interviews and resourcing all the images (yet again) to even higher resolution. Now those stills are displayed in full-width, edge-to-edge format no matter what device you’re viewing them on. In addition, I’ve started to switch all the interviews to use the leading hero image that is displayed before the title block. Here is how it looks like on smaller, phone-sized screens:
And this is how it looks like on larger, laptop / desktop sized screens:
This is probably it for the 2019 edition of tending this little web garden of mine. What will the year 2020 bring?
Stay tuned for a more technical overview of how this can be achieved in WordPress.
As usual, DragonCon comes to Atlanta over the Labor Day weekend. These are my personal highlights from the opening parade this year.
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:
💔 marks an incompatible API / binary change
😻 marks new features
🤷♀️ marks bug fixes and general improvements
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
Trident
Photon
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.
