Today’s post highlights the design of CrayonsLife.com by Jessette Dayate. The background texture is reminiscent of the pattern left by the crayons on a pavement. This texture extends into the inset effect of the page header title, as well as the beautiful hand-drawn illustration of a girl sitting on a stack of crayons. The footer section uses illustrations as well – for the horizontal separator and the tweet decoration. If you reload the page, note the fade-in effects on the “Latest project” images.
The layout could use a little bit more alignment. The left edge of header section text hangs in between the two columns of the main content. And while the left edge of the “Latest project” images is aligned with the main content column, the right edge falls short.
While careful design will pay special attention to the number of UI controls shown at any given moment, some scenarios may result in showing more controls than can fit in the available space – either horizontally or vertically. In Swing, these situations are usually addressed by wrapping the controls in a JScrollPane, which can be configured to show the scrollbars only when they are necessary. While the scroll bars are pervasive and an easily recognized solution, sometimes they add too much visual noise and hurt the application usability.
Here is an example from the last post on the breadcrumb bar:
Here, the application window is not wide enough to show the full selected path – and adding a horizontal scroll bar between the breadcrumb bar and the main file listing panel would be a very bad design decision. Instead, the scrolling is done using the two double-arrow buttons placed on both sides of the breadcrumb bar. Another example can be found in the post that talked about scrollable popup menus:
Additional examples can be found in the entry that talked about horizontal shrinking of the ribbon component.
Originally contributed as part of the breadcrumb bar component by Rick Jeliffe of Topologi, the scrolling functionality has since been extracted and reused across other parts of Flamingo. And now for the good news – the latest 5.0dev drop of Flamingo component library (code-named Imogene) exposes the scrollable panel as part of the published API.
The main class is org.pushingpixels.flamingo.common.JScrollablePanel. You construct it by passing the view and the ScrollType – either HORIZONTALLY or VERTICALLY (note that the scroll type cannot be changed once the component has been constructed). When needed, the component will show the scroller buttons – just the same way as JScrollPane shows the scroll bars. Moving the mouse over a scroller button (when it’s visible) starts auto-scrolling the view in the matching direction. To turn off the auto-scrolling and do the scrolling only on button press call JScrollerPanel.setScrollOnRollover(false) API.
To fully reveal a specific part of the view, call JScrollerPanel.scrollToIfNecessary(), passing the start position and span in pixels. The values are either in X or Y coordinates – depending on the scroll type of the scroller panel. You can also register a change listener on the component to be notified whenever the layout change occurs. This comes handy if you have custom drawing outside the scroller panel that depends on the position of the scroller panel view.
If you want to take the scroller panel for a spin, you will need the following:
Note that the last two are required if you’re running your application under one of Substance skins. You will need the 6.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin – the latest 5.0dev drop of Flamingo core is incompatible with the 6.0 release of Substance Flamingo plugin – as mentioned before.
Flamingo component suite began its life in January 2006 when Rick Jeliffe of Topologi has contacted me and proposed to open-source their own implementation of the breadcrumb bar component. In the years since i have hacked at different pieces of the breadcrumb bar implementation. As with any significant piece of code that you get to maintain and extend, it takes some time to find your way around the code, and this was no exception.
Piece by piece i cleaned the component API, refactored the code into the model and UI delegates and integrated the API with the command button panel. The last (almost) untouched piece was the painting of individual segments. It was rather cumbersome, and i finally got around to replacing it all with command buttons. This not only helped removing a lot of code that was implementing the same functionality available in command buttons, but also pointed out missing pieces that were added in the last few weeks to command buttons and command popup menus.
If you’re using the breadcrumb bar component in your application, you should not see any difference – except more polished look. If you’re using command buttons in your application, here are a couple of tips on how to use them to their fullest potential. First, a screenshot of a file explorer that uses the breadcrumb bar (under the Gemini skin from Substance look-and-feel):
When the breadcrumb segment is inactive, its arrow points to the side. When the mouse is over the arrow icon, the arrow points downwards. Here is how the command button is configured:
button.setDisplayState(CommandButtonDisplayState.MEDIUM);
button.setPopupOrientationKind(CommandButtonPopupOrientationKind.SIDEWARD);
button.setHGapScaleFactor(0.75);
button.getPopupModel().addChangeListener(new ChangeListener() {
@Override
public void stateChanged(ChangeEvent e) {
PopupButtonModel model = button.getPopupModel();
boolean displayDownwards = model.isRollover()
|| model.isPopupShowing();
CommandButtonPopupOrientationKind popupOrientationKind = displayDownwards ?
CommandButtonPopupOrientationKind.DOWNWARD
: CommandButtonPopupOrientationKind.SIDEWARD;
button.setPopupOrientationKind(popupOrientationKind);
}
});
First, we configure the button to be in MEDIUM display state (small icon and text right beside it), set the popup orientation kind to SIDEWARD and set the horizontal gap scale factor to 0.75 (to have smaller horizontal gap between the icon, text and arrow). Then, we add a ChangeListener to the button’s popup model. The listener checks to see if the mouse is over the popup area with PopupButtonModel.isRollover() or the popup is showing with PopupButtonModel.isPopupShowing(). Then we call JCommandButton.setPopupOrientationKind with DOWNWARD if either condition holds, or SIDEWARD otherwise. This is it – and using only published JCommandButton APIs.
If you use the breadcrumb bar in your application, try showing the popup menu and then move the mouse along the breadcrumb bar while the popup menu is showing. You will see that when you move the mouse over the popup area of another segment, the breadcrumb bar will automatically show the popup menu for that segment – without a need to click it. Here is the relevant code:
button.getPopupModel().addChangeListener(new ChangeListener() {
boolean rollover = button.getPopupModel().isRollover();
@Override
public void stateChanged(ChangeEvent e) {
SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
@Override
public void run() {
boolean isRollover = button.getPopupModel()
.isRollover();
if (isRollover == rollover)
return;
if (isRollover) {
// does any *other* button show popup?
for (JCommandButton bcbButton : buttonStack) {
if (bcbButton == button)
continue;
if (bcbButton.getPopupModel().isPopupShowing()) {
// scroll to view
scrollerPanel.scrollToIfNecessary(button
.getBounds().x, button.getWidth());
// simulate click on the popup area
// of *this* button
button.doPopupClick();
}
}
}
rollover = isRollover;
}
});
}
});
What do we have here? Once again, we add a ChangeListener to the popup model of every segment. In the listener we are tracking changes to the rollover state. If we detect a change, and the new value is true, we go over all the buttons in the breadcrumb bar and try to locate a button that displays the popup menu (there can only be at most one at any time). If we found any – using PopupButtonModel.isPopupShowing() – it means that we need to show the popup menu for our button. We ask the scroller panel that wraps the breadcrumb bar to scroll our button so that it becomes full visible (more on this in the next blog entry) and then call JCommandButton.doPopupClick(). Internally this is handled as a regular mouse click on the popup area – dismissing the current popup menu, invoking the popup callback of our button to return the popup menu and displaying the popup menu aligned with our button.
In addition to being able to use the powerful published APIs of the command buttons, the breadcrumb bar now looks much better – both under core look-and-feels, and under the different Substance skins. The screenshot above shows the breadcrumb bar under Gemini skin that uses dark background for the header section. The breadcrumb bar gets all the right visuals since it is now implemented with command buttons which get all the right colors, and rollover animations.
If you want to take the new breadcrumb bar (with the same external APIs) for a spin, you will need the following:
Note that the last two are required if you’re running your application under one of Substance skins. You will need the 6.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin – the latest 5.0dev drop of Flamingo core is incompatible with the 6.0 release of Substance Flamingo plugin – as mentioned before.
I’ve spend the last few days pushing a few pixels improving the alignment of ribbon band controls in the latest Flamingo 5.0dev. This is how it looked before:
And this is how it looks now:
Main improvements:
- Equal amount of horizontal white space around the controls
- Equal amount of vertical white space between the buttons
- Aligning bottom edges of controls across columns
The change is in Flamingo 5.0dev only, so you can still use the final 6.0 releases of Substance core and Substance Flamingo plugin. There’s also a matching test case using the excellent FEST library. Thanks to Ivan for pointing this out and testing the fixes.
