Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• Geoffrey Wiseman shares an interesting tip on hiding a UI during the test running. In order to get the UI tests running on the continuous integration server, they needed to find a way to run in headless environment. While it appears that the solution works only on X server, it opens an intriguing array of possibilities which hopefully can be implemented in a cross-platform way in a general purpose UI test library such as Fest (by Alex Ruiz and Yvonne Wang Price). This would be useful in areas beyond testing. For example, most of the documentation screenshots for Substance (that show various themes, watermarks and skins applied to the same UI) are taken by a Robot-controled process. During this process (which takes a few minutes) i have to make sure that i don’t accidentally interact with the frames and dialogs that get captured so as not to interfere with the correct visuals. Can this process can be done in a headless mode with an approach similar to what Geoffrey is describing?
• Davide Raccagni announced release 2.0 of his A03 look-and-feel (link a little slow to open because of embedded videos). A major change is that A03 now can run under JDK 5.0 (unlike the previous releases). In addition, it features a theming layer and has a few interesting visuals (such as decorated title pane gradients, progress bar fill pattern, rotated tabs on left and right placement and some others). Personally, i’m very happy to see that some code in A03 is based on the code from Substance (which is, in turn, based on some code from Looks, Quaqua and Xoetrope).
• Elliott Hughes shares his frustration with the JTextPane implementation when it shows an HTML document. Starting from trying to prevent beeps on setText() API, he quickly gets into one of the biggest gaps in Swing as a modern UI toolkit (not mentioned in my previous rant) – support for HTML 4.0. Hasn’t it been eight years since it was finalized?

This is the third part of the series on new visuals for the JRibbon component under Substance look-and-feel, and it’s time to talk about one of my favorite features in Substance – animations. Those of you familiar with the Office 2007 might have noticed that while the in-ribbon galleries provide nice scrolling animations, other parts of the ribbon are not animated. Specifically, i’m talking about rollover effects on the ribbon buttons and tabs – the transitions between the default (flat) and the rollover (active) states are immediate.

Here is a small video that shows the JRibbon rollover transitions under the normal animation speed settings. The skin is the new Creme Coffee:

And here is a video of the same rollover transitions under the Office Blue 2007 skin:
Want to take it for a spin? You’ll need the latest binaries of Substance, Flamingo and Substance Flamingo plugin.

In the first part, i showed a few screenshots of the new look of the JRibbon component under Substance look-and-feel. Continuing the series, today i’m going to show an additional new feature that allows creating less intrusive UIs with the JRibbon.

Substance already has a client property that you can install on a specific component or globally on the UIManager. When the USE_THEMED_DEFAULT_ICONS property is set to Boolean.TRUE, the button icons of buttons in default state (not rolled over, not selected, not pressed) are colorized with the colors of the current theme. This works especially well under low-contrast skins such as Raven Graphite or Autumn, and now it is also supported on the JRibbon button components.

Here is a screenshot of the JRibbon component under the Raven Graphite skin when the USE_THEMED_DEFAULT_ICONS client property is not specified. As you can see, the icons are fully colored, which results in a slightly intrusive UI:

Here is the same UI when this property is set:

And here is the same UI when the mouse is hovering over the “Paste” button:

Here is the original full-color UI under the Autumn skin:

And the same UI with the property set:

And the same UI with the mouse hovering over the “Computer” icon:

Here is the original full-color UI under the Creme skin:

And the same UI with the property set:

And the same UI with the mouse hovering over the “Computer” icon:

Want to take it for a spin? You’ll need the latest binaries of Substance, Flamingo and Substance Flamingo plugin.

It’s been more than two years since i first started working on all-Java version of the Office 2007 ribbon component (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). Since then, there have been quite a few visual improvements in the Substance look-and-feel, and it’s time to apply these to the Substance Flamingo plugin. This series will walk through the major UI changes to the JRibbon component that is now much better aligned with the look of core and SwingX components under Substance.

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Office Silver 2007 skin:

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Office Blue 2007 skin:

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Creme skin:

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Business skin:

And here is how JRibbon looks under the Autumn skin:

Want to take it for a spin? You’ll need the latest binaries of Substance, Flamingo and Substance Flamingo plugin.