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

• Jan Erik Paulsen is working on a new RIA tool named Amanda. Some nice screenshots that use the Titanium look-and-feel that is based on Substance.
• The release notes for Java 5 on Leopard include a few new client properties that can be used to provide functionality missing from the core Swing components. Examples include indeterminate progress circular indicator, smaller controls and search text fields.
• Jan Haderka writes about detecting Caps Lock state on the JXLoginPanel SwingX component. This thread on java.net forums has additional comments. The current solution does not sound too robust, and since the correct approach requires using native code (which is currently missing from the JDK), use with care.
• Eclipse 3.4M3 release notes mention the new API on the Shell component. It allows setting an alpha channel value on supported platforms (see screenshot). While the matching functionality is available in the JNA project for Swing, it’s really time for the core Swing team to provide it in JDK. It’s missing in Tiger, it’s missing in Mustang, and it most probably won’t be in Dolphin (due to major work by the client team on the “Update N” which leaves them with only a few months for Dolphin).
• Hrish writes about problems with file access in signed applets under IE 7 on Windows Vista. There are some links to MSDN articles, but i think that a more important link would be to Chet’s blog on this subject where he says that “There is an issue worth noting here than cannot be fixed: IE7 on Vista will not let us access the file system outside the IE7 sandbox for applets. This means that even “signed” applets have no permission to write to arbitrary locations on disk. This behavior differs from the old behavior of applets on Windows, but given the restrictions of IE7, there is really no way around the problem.” I’m not sure how this sits along with the user comments on bug 6504236 that say that “there is a well documented design to allow IE add-ins access the file system from the user’s normal (Medium) Integrity level, rather the IE’s Low Integrity level: implement an Internet Explorer Broker Process“.

This week has also seen a few announcements:

• Mikael Grev has announced release 3.0 of MigLayout project. The main emphasis of this release is on automatic support for resolution independence, which is a very important topic that doesn’t get the attention it deserves (neither in Java world nor elsewhere).
• David Qiao has announced release 2.2.1 of JIDE component suite. The new components are group list, dual list and aggregate table – all of these are not available in the open-source common layer.
• Instantiations has announced release 6.5.0 of the WindowBuilder family of products with a few enhancements to the Swing designer.
• Hans Muller has announced release 1.03 of Swing Application Framework, the reference implementation of JSR 296, while Shannon Hickey has announced release 1.2 and release 1.2.1 of Beans Binding, the reference implementation of JSR 295. There are some breaking changes in the Beans Binding 1.2 (see release notes). While on one hand it is expected from an evolving project which has not been finalized, it brings some interesting questions nonetheless. The first one (this is also relevant for Swing Application Framework) – what exactly do the version numbers signify? Was the release 1.0 just something to “tag” and release so that people will consider it as a production-ready implementation? Or perhaps these are the versions used in NetBeans 6.0 betas – which makes it even worse considering that NetBeans is an IDE and these two projects are JSR reference implementations. And what happens when NetBeans 6.0 is frozen (somewhere this week) and there are still breaking API changes in these two projects?

The release candidate for version 4.1 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Lima) is available. The list of new features includes:

• Full HiDPI support (part 1, part 2, part 3).
• Font policy for Gnome desktops.
• API for installing a scaled font policy.
• New Creme Coffee skin.
• Inner border painters.
• New visuals for tabbed pane content border.
• Transition-aware animating icons for control icons.
• New version of Xoetrope color wheel for the color chooser component.
• Better visuals for the JRibbon component (part 1, part 2, part 3) in the Substance Flamingo plugin.
• Support for the GroupLayout baseline functionality in the Substance Baseline plugin.

Some applications may need to follow the instructions in the migration guide. Target date for release is November 12. Only defects will be fixed until this date.

In addition to the core release candidate, the following Substance plugins and modules have been updated as well:

• Substance Flamingo plugin for the latest 2.1dev drop of Flamingo component suite.
• Substance SwingX plugin for the build 255 of SwingX component suite.
• Substance Baseline plugin for release 1.0.2 of Swing-Layout project.
• Substance NetBeans module for 6.0beta2 of NetBeans IDE.

Special thanks for bug reporting and testing go to Mikael Grev, Vincent Trussart, Kamil Paral, Klaus Rheinwald and Jean-Francois Poilpret.

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.