I’m very happy to report that NetBeans developers have unrolled the changes that broke the Substance NetBeans module (reported in early May on NetBeans bug tracker). And so, if you’re using the daily builds of NetBeans 6.0 (after July 26th), you can install the latest development drop of Substance 4.0 module (code-named Key Largo).
Many thanks to NetBeans team and Standa Aubrecht in particular for listening to the community and making these changes that allow third-party look-and-feels to provide modules for both NetBeans IDE itself and NetBeans RCP programs. Standa was courteous enough to provide a patch that removes usage of deprecated APIs and unnecessary functionality. The only minor defect that will be fixed in the consistent appearance for tab scroll buttons.
The “Support for SwingX components” series (parts i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii and viii) showed the the support for SwingX components in Substance look and feel, while the “Advanced animations on core Swing components” series (parts i, ii, iii and iv) showed the extensive enhancements to the animations done on the core Swing components. This entry shows the extended animations available on the JXMonthView component in the latest drop of the Substance SwingX plugin.
With the great help of Jan Haderka of SwingX project (see the progress on this issue), the JXMonthView now features complete rollover and selection animations which are fully consistent with animations on core JLists, JTrees and JTables. The first video shows different rollover and selection animations on a month view component under the Office Silver 2007 skin. Note how the animations respect different state-specific color schemes and alpha values.
The second video shows the same month view component under the dark Raven Graphite skin:
The last video shows the same month view component under the dark Magma skin. Note the rollover and selection animations are done on both the background and the foreground colors. Also note that the animations are done on the individual days as well as on the month view header (which now uses drop-shadow painting of the month / year strings):
This is the fourth part in the ongoing series about advanced animations on core Swing component built-in to the latest binary drops of Substance look-and-feel.
The first part showed rollover and selection background animations on menus, sliders, tables and table headers
The second part showed rollover foreground animations on menus under a skin that uses dark background fill on menubars
The third part showed rollover and selection background and foreground animations under a mixed dark-light theme
This part demonstrates the animations under the new Magma skin. Unlike other mixed dark-light skins (Nebula, Nebula Brick Wall and Business Black Steel), pretty much all animations under Magma feature dark-light transitions for both background and foreground colors. Here is a sample video that shows animation effects on buttons, toggle buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons (note that for the later two, the foreground is not animated):
The next video shows rollover animation effects on Magma sliders:
The last video shows a complex rollover animation effect on Magma tabs. Substance provides support for tab close buttons. When installed, Substance shows the close buttons on the currently selected and the currently rolled over tab. On rolled over tabs, the close button is faded as the mouse moves over the tabbed pane. For Magma, this means that the close button animation has two channels – during the fade in, the color fades from white to black, and the alpha fades from 0.0 to 1.0. During the fade out, the color fades from black to white, and the alpha fades from 1.0 to 0.0. The video shows the rollover animation sequence under very slow animation speed so you can follow this effect:
You can run a test WebStart application by clicking the button below. The application is signed and requires read-only access to the local disk (for the filetree). In order to switch to Magma, go to the Skins menu and select “Magma”.
