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.

I’ve written about the Woopra client last July, and had its creator Elie El Khoury answer a few of my questions just before the New Year’s eve. About a week ago Elie has announced the release candidate for the new Woopra version, and i’ve had a great time ever since playing the new version and searching for the small visual details that add up to a great user experience.

You can read about the new functionality in Elie’s announcement, and here i just want to point out a few UI elements that i particularly like.

The first one is the new sidebar that provides a clear organization of the available statistics sections. The different sections are collapsible, and the overall choice of colors results in good readability even for darker background colors:

The new dashboard view provides a vibrant yet clear way to view the overall visitor count over the last two weeks and the last 24 hours. Note the translucent charts for the counts the day before (in the top chart), and the translucent overlay for the specific node under the mouse pointer:

Translucency is used in a lot of places in the new Woopra client, but its usage is well designed and placed. Here is a map view with translucent overlay showing the details of the specific live visitor (note the drop shadow of the overlay):

Here is one more screenshot of translucent content. The map has an overlay showing the visitor count broken down by the country. The overlay floats on the right border of the map, and has translucent list and opaque glassy scrollbar to scroll the country list:

Congratulations to Elie and the team on the great new functionality and excellent new looks!

EclipseCon 2009 is next week, and on Tuesday, March 24, i will be presenting a session called “On The Shoulders of Giants: Harnessing the Power of Eclipse Enterprise Ecosystem“. Here is the abstract:

Code reuse in large projects is not just a trendy buzzword. If you can build upon solid, evolving and well tested foundations that are developed and maintained by committed teams, you have much less code to test, integrate and support. The Eclipse Ecosystem is a prime example of an extremely rich foundation for building enterprise grade applications, and this talk is going to show the diverse, yet interoperable technologies that allow businesses to concentrate on their specific requirements without reinventing the plumbing layers.

A part of a larger client-facing offering, Amdocs Smart Client Designer is an advanced visual designer that allows seamless collaboration between designers and developers in creating complex business form-based applications for Support Call Centers in the telecommunication industry. Harnessing the power of such technologies as JDT, GEF, EMF, JEM and VE has allowed us to dramatically reduce the effort to build the basic blocks of the tool (such as persistence, code generation and java syntax tree manipulations). In addition, core platform features such as task and job managers, builders, natures, markers and many more are enabling user-centric asynchronous business flows in a clean, simple and maintainable way.

Building on top of a vibrant and evolving ecosystem has been a pleasant experience, further strengthened by a recent migration to Java 6, Eclipse 3.4 and the latest version of the dependent plugins. In addition, we are going to talk about the “Eclipse way” of designing the flows, where the existing core features guide the design process to facilitate familiar flows and simpler implementation.

If you are developing a large Eclipse-based offering, or considering Eclipse as the vehicle for your next enterprise-grade tool, come to our session to hear about our experiences in this area.

It’s not too late to register (with 10% off by following the links at the official conference blog). See you next Tuesday at 13:30 in room 206.

In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements in Substance 5.2 (code-named Quebec), i’m planning to introduce a few new skins. The first is Dust which is based on the artwork done by Rico Sta Cruz and Kido Mariano for Ubuntu. If you want to take it for a spin, click on the WebStart button below and change the skin to Dust from the “Skins” menu:

To use it in your application, you have the following three options:

• -Dswing.defaultlaf=org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceDustLookAndFeel
• UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new SubstanceDustLookAndFeel())
• UIManager.setLookAndFeel("org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceDustLookAndFeel");

Here are a few screenshots that show this new skin. A small frame with a tabbed pane and a few different controls:

A frame with menu bar, tool bar and status bar from SwingX project:

A thumbnail of the main Substance test application (click for full-size view):

As with all Substance core skins, this is work in progress and will be polished over time. Dust is also the first skin that is using the experimental color schemes definition file. While the existing Autumn and Nebula skins have been moved to use such files as well, this functionality is planned to be officially supported in the next major Substance release.

In the meantime, you’re more than welcome to take the latest 5.2dev drop for a spin and leave your comments.