Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
- James Williams has a tongue-in-cheek list of five tips to tame Matisse layouts. This resonates with my earlier post on JBuilder and getting locked to an IDE that enforces any non-standard logic on the UI code that it creates.
- Luan O’Carroll writes about distributing a WebStart application via CD-ROM, expanding on such subjects as WebStart cache, not relying on existing JRE installations, working with no Internet connection and others.
- Build 27 of 6u10 is out and it addresses the issue that prevented applications from using the Synthetica look-and-feel. It also features performance improvements for Nimbus (about 8% as measured in the dynamic performance suite from the LightBeam project). Although not official, we can expect the release candidate of 6u10 this week.
- Ken Orr writes about a custom implementation of placard button commonly found in Mac applications.
- Alexander Potochkin introduces yet another useful feature of his JXLayer project – ability to lock (disable) the entire Swing container, including blocking any user interaction with its children.
- The “Ask the Experts” session on 6u10 is over, and (much like two years ago), i had a question that was not addressed. I will be polite and blame the intratubes, but the topic at hand will be a subject of a forthcoming entry.
Every once in a while i get questions on using the Mac OS X menu bar for Swing applications running under Substance look-and-feel. This refers to the apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar VM flag that is respected by the native Aqua look-and-feel (and its third-party Quaqua extension). Up until this week the only advice that i could give was to use AWT menus (thanks to Quaqua’s author Werner Randelshofer for this). However, it is not the optimal solution for cross-platform Swing applications that wish to use Swing menus on non-Mac platform.
As i was thinking about this problem after being recently contacted by Sergiy Michka, i thought about an alternative solution which was later reviewed by Swing lead for Apple VM Mike Swingler. The solution is not specific to Substance and should work under other core and third-party look-and-feels that allow mixing menu UI delegates from other look-and-feels. Here is what you can do in your Swing application to have your menus appear on the global menu bar (in addition to setting the above VM flag):
- Check that you’re running under Apple VM. Use
<font color="darkblue">System.getProperty("os.name")</font> and check that the value starts with “Mac”.
- Set Aqua (or the future default Apple VM platform look-and-feel) with
<font color="darkblue">UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName())</font>.
- Query and store the following
<font color="darkblue">UIManager</font> entries: “MenuBarUI”, “MenuUI”, “MenuItemUI”, “CheckBoxMenuItemUI”, “RadioButtonMenuItemUI”, “PopupMenuUI”.
- Set your look-and-feel of preference with
<font color="darkblue">UIManager.setLookAndFeel</font> call.
- Before creating your first window, restore the
<font color="darkblue">UIManager</font> entries for the keys specified in the third step.
Now the menus on the fronted frame will go into the global menu bar. It is not recommended to rely on the current class names for the Aqua UI delegates, since the package that hosts these classes is different for different versions of Apple VM. This is mentioned in the release notes for Apple VM 1.6.0 on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (radar #4907470).
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
- Kaushik Sathupadi writes about implementing mouse gestures in Swing. Personally, i haven’t found mouse gestures to be overly useful until now, but your users might have a different opinion.
- Danny Coward, Ken Russell and Richard Bair host the “Ask the Experts” session this week on 6u10 over at SDN. Last year Two years ago i wasn’t too lucky and my questions were screened out, but things may change this year.
- Michael Gvirtzman has a new Swing application called “Golden Rules”. It allows several planning levels, actual effort tracking, mind mapping, and contact management, providing function-rich goal system for both beginners and professionals and uses SwingX.
- JavaSwing.net has a short tutorial on InputVerifier, including background on relevant scenarios and sample code.
- Business Swing applications don’t have to be ugly (especially if you’re willing to depart from Metal / Ocean), as the new round of Palantir screenshots shows.
- Clemens Eisserer is one of the chosen finalists for the OpenJDK Innovators’ Challenge with his proposal for implementing XRender pipeline for Java2D. You can follow his blog to track the progress, and this week he announced that the project itself will be hosted at java.net.
- Greg Brown has posted the second part of a practical introduction to the new Pivot UI framework.
- Matt Fletcher writes about his experiences in rolling a JRuby desktop application.
- On a related topic, Mario Aquino has two new screencasts on desktop JRuby libraries. The first screencast is on Cheri and the second screencast is on Monkeybars.
Jeff Friesen is a prolific Java desktop author on such sites as JavaWorld.com and InformIT.com, and his article on parsing .ico files and exposing the icon planes as BufferedImages. One of the areas mentioned in our JavaOne presentation on high-resolution monitors is scaling the application icons, and the org.jvnet.flamingo.common.icon.ResizableIcon interface aims to provide this support.
It was relatively easy to adapt Jeff’s code and create an implementation of ResizableIcon interface that loads .ico files and chooses the best icon plane for the specific size. The org.jvnet.flamingo.common.icon.IcoWrapperResizableIcon is the implementation and you can see how it is used in the test.imageviewer.IcoViewer.
Here is a screenshot of this application showing file icons from the Jordan Michael‘s portfolio under 128*128 size (click for the full view):
and here is the same application with the icon size changed to 256*256 (click for the full view):
The code for parsing the .ico format has been contributed by Jeff under the BSD license. The following must be referenced if you reuse this code in your application:
