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):

1. 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”.
2. Set Aqua (or the future default Apple VM platform look-and-feel) with <font color="darkblue">UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName())</font>.
3. Query and store the following <font color="darkblue">UIManager</font> entries: “MenuBarUI”, “MenuUI”, “MenuItemUI”, “CheckBoxMenuItemUI”, “RadioButtonMenuItemUI”, “PopupMenuUI”.
4. Set your look-and-feel of preference with <font color="darkblue">UIManager.setLookAndFeel</font> call.
5. 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:

• Jeff Friesen name
• InformIT.com
• The original article itself.

This week i have started working on providing Substance plugin for the JIDE common layer components. The main project page contains the overview information on using the early drops of this plugin, and you will need the latest 5.0dev drop of the core library to use the early drops.

At the present time the plugin contains the UI delegate for the JideButton component, complete with what you expect from the Substance look-and-feel:

• Full animations on rollovers, selections, press etc, including animating both background and foreground colors.
• Support for high-DPI mode, including margins, insets and borders.
• Support for decoration areas.
• Animating the text underline on rollovers over hyperlink-styled buttons.

Here is a screenshot of JideButton components under different settings (click to see full view):

Here is a short video of rollover effects over different button styles. Note the animations on the background colors, translucency and the text underline of hyperlink-styled buttons:

And here is a short video of the rollover effects under the core Magma skin. Note how the foreground colors are animated properly (including the always-white foreground on hyperlink-styled buttons that never show the background fill):

This is just a preview of the features that will be eventually available in the final plugin release. The goal is to provide the full range of Substance functionality for all JIDE common layer components.