Following the work that has been done to revisit and polish the Office Blue skin of Substance look-and-feel closer to the original visuals, the last two weeks have seen major improvements in the Office Silver skin that bring it closer to the Office 2007 visuals as well.

Here is a screenshot of the old Office Silver skin:

While the overall direction is right (grays + a combination of yellow / orange colors for active states), it quite far from the original visuals.

Here is how it looks in the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama):

To see the new Office Silver skin in action on the Flamingo ribbon component, run the following WebStart demo and switch to Office Silver in the Look & Feel task:

If you want to test new visuals and APIs, you will need to take the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama). Release candidate for Substance is scheduled for January 26 and the final release is scheduled for February 9.

Not much time has passed since i’ve announced that the Swing link of the week trail on this blog has come to an end, and Jonathan Giles has decided to step in and continue posting theweekly round-up of the Swing related news.

You can find the first entry of the year on Jonathan’s blog, and he just started twittering about it. So, you’re more than welcome to subscribe to his feed and send your links his way (he has his e-mail on the first entry).

To aid Jonathan in his weekly quest, here are a few places that i used to collect the links:

• dzone new links
• java.net blogs
• javablogs.com custom query (keyword Swing)
• java.net desktop forums
• java.sun.com desktop forums
• javaposse google newsgroup
• feeds of blogs previously features on the series

The Office Blue skin in Substance look-and-feel has already been reworked to be closer to the original Office 2007 visuals, and this work has continued over the last two weeks to provide an even better visual match.

Here is how the sample Flamingo ribbon application looked like under Office Blue two weeks ago:

and here is how it looks now:

The incomplete list of visual tweaks includes:

• Glass subdued gradient on the title pane
• More fidelity in glass gradients on active (rollover, selected, pressed, armed) buttons
• More fidelity in border gradients
• More fidelity and subdued glass gradient on the ribbon bands
• Less contrast between text and arrow color on ribbon command buttons
• Subdued foreground color of ribbon band footer panels
• Better contrast between ribbon band content and ribbon band footer panel
• Colorizing icons of disabled ribbon components

This is still work in progress, but in the meantime you’re welcome to take the latest 5.1dev drop of core Substance (code-named Panama) and the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin. Release candidate for Substance is scheduled for January 26 and the final release is scheduled for February 9.

Jitterbug is a visual editor for creating and editing color schemes in Substance look-and-feel. It primarily addresses the scenarios where you need to translate design mockups or emulate existing UI visuals as a Substance skin. Created during the rework of the Office Blue skin, it was used to create and refine all seventeen color schemes currently used in this skin.

The following screenshot shows Jitterbug in action (click to see full size view):

To see the Jitterbug in action, run the following signed WebStart demo:

Here i would like to ask for your feedback. This tool was created to scratch my own itch – it was getting quite tedious creating and tweaking color schemes. I did try to make both flows straightforward and intuitive. However, i cannot be an objective judge of my own creation. As such, i am not detailing any instructions on how to use Jitterbug. If you find yourself stuck in the middle of the process, or the flows do not simply make sense, let me know in the comments.