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.
In addition to releasing Trident 1.2 and Substance 6.0, today i have released the following:
- Laf-Plugin version 1.2 code named Landshark. This is used by Substance to find and load its plugins.
- Laf-Widget version 5.0 code named Magnolia. This is used by Substance to add visual and behavioral features to specific component types.
- Lightbeam version 1.1 code named Betelgeuse. This is used to analyze Substance performance and make sure there are no performance regressions.
- Rainbow version 1.2 code named Blackstone. A small test application written with Alex Potochkin to test Substance, Flamingo and JXLayer.
An unfortunate omission is the Flamingo component suite. As much as i would have loved to be able to have Flamingo 5.0 join the release train today, it was not realistic given the time constraints. So, instead of delaying the releases of all the projects, i have decided to have Flamingo be developed in its own timeline. The final 6.0 release of Substance Flamingo is based on the latest 5.0dev daily drops of Flamingo core. As the work on Flamingo core continues, the interested applications will need to use daily builds of Substance and Substance Flamingo. My intent is to release Flamingo 5.0 together with Substance 6.1.
It is a great pleasure to announce the availability of the final release or version 1.2 of Trident animation library (code-named Cookie Jar). The major milestone for this release is moving Substance 6.0 to use Trident – along with validating the library performance and flexibility to support a wide variety of UI animations. Trident 1.2 has also added a few new APIs to address a few common application requirements:
- Custom property accessors
- Refined APIs for stopping timelines
You’re more than welcome to take Trident 1.2 for a ride and see what it can do to add animations to your Swing and SWT applications. To see how Trident is used to drive application animation scenarios, see its use in the following projects:
It is a great pleasure to announce the availability of the final release or version 6.0 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Sonoma). The release notes for version 6.0 contain the detailed information on the contents of this release which include the following:
- Multi-state animated transitions
- New look for text based components (text fields, combo boxes, spinners, date pickers)
- Custom component states
- Support for drop location
Animations in Substance 6.0 are powered by the Trident animation library. You will need to add the matching Trident jar to your classpath. Substance 6.0 is using version 1.2 of Trident which can be downloaded from the main Trident download area or from the Substance 6.0 download area.
In addition to deprecated APIs that have been removed in version 6.0 (see the release notes for version 5.3), application code that uses the following Substance APIs will need to be revisited:
- All painter APIs now operate on a single color scheme. Application code that passed two different color schemes will now need to call the matching APIs twice, and use the relevant composites on the graphics context.
- Configuring the animation settings is now done with the
org.pushingpixels.lafwidget.animation.AnimationConfigurationManager APIs. In addition, application that want to control the resolution of the animation pulses should consult the Trident documentation on this topic.
Click on the button below to launch a signed WebStart application that shows the available Substance features.
The following sub-projects are also available:
You are more than welcome to take Substance 6.0 for a ride. Sample screenshots of Substance 6.0 in action:
