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

• A three-part series by Eric Burke on do’s and do not’s of scroll panes. Read part 1, part 2 and part 3. A good rule of thumb would be to never use scroll panes for wrapping UI controls. Only use them for wrapping text areas, trees, lists and tables.
• The first public tutorial on using AnimatedTransitions library by Nazmul Idris. Promised at this year’s JavaOne and covered in Filthy Rich Clients, this library is yet to see the light of the day (and hence the tutorial is a little unexpected). I’ve written on the subject of UI transitions before, questioning the usefulness of this technique; it still appears that this field draws a few “that’s interesting” but doesn’t go much farther than that. An interesting paper can be found in the Phosphor research project that puts some hard numbers on transitions usability.
• Want to use Swing look-and-feels in Groovy 1.1 applications? Danno Ferrin shows you how.
• SwingWorker gets some internal facelift in the latest Dolphin binaries, switching the thread pool implementation to the standard java.util.concurrent classes.
• Matt Nathan has a first draft of the tutorial on JXComponent and XComponentUI classes. Combined with Jan Haderka‘s announcement on release 0.9 of SwingX (which coincided with the downtime for swinglabs.org), it shows that there is still some life in SwingX. Unfortunately, it still lacks well-defined release schedule and strong commitment from Sun to the development lifecycle and overall direction of the project.

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

• A very informative posting on the AppFramework mailing list from Hans Muller that includes advice by Shannon Hickey on handling uncaught exceptions in EDT. There are three alternatives, none of them providing a complete solution (unfortunately):
  • Toolkit.getSystemEventQueue.push() with a custom event queue.
  • The “sun.awt.exception.handler” system property.
  • Thread.setUncaughtExceptionHandler(UncaughtExceptionHandler). This option is also mentioned here.
• An article by Rene Ghosh on implementing a text console component, complete with color and anti-alias support.
• A posting by Oscar Vega Gisbert on improving the menu selection layer in Swing. A very interesting and LAF-agnostic approach that should be made a part of core Swing implementation. Full source code available.
• An overview of the existing SVG to Java2D transcoders by Jan Erik Paulsen, and their extension to the Javascript based Darkstar FX renderers.

Just before the feature freeze of Substance 4.1, i added a new Coffee Cream skin that is based on the existing Creme skin and the Ubuntu’ish brown active theme. If you want to take it for a spin, click on the WebStart button below and change the skin to Coffee Cream from the “Skins” menu:

To use it in your application, you have the following three options:

• -Dswing.defaultlaf=org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceCremeCoffeeLookAndFeel
• UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new SubstanceCremeCoffeeLookAndFeel())
• UIManager.setLookAndFeel("org.jvnet.substance.skin.SubstanceCremeCoffeeLookAndFeel");

Here are a few screenshots that show this new skin. A small frame with a tabbed pane and a few different controls:

A frame with a tree and a list:

Sliders in different states:

(New) Progress bars in different states:

Error pane component from SwingX project:

A frame with menu bar, tool bar and status bar from SwingX project:

Over the past releases of Substance look and feel I found that it helps to have a well-defined release lifecycle and schedule. The usual cycle for a minor release is 12 weeks long, with last two weeks being the release candidate stage and the two weeks before that (a month before the final release) being feature freeze. For the upcoming version 4.1 (code-named Lima) which is scheduled to be released on November 12th, the feature freeze is this Sunday. There are a few new features, most of them coming from the users. In this post, i’m going to talk about two of these.

The first is the reworked visual appearance of tabbed pane content border and a client property to control it in the application code. Here is how this border looked like in the previous release under Business Black Steel skin:

Here is how it looks like in the new release (the gaps between the checkboxes and radio buttons have been artificially tweaked to have the content fit on the frame):

The main difference is in the top portion of the content pane border. By default, it now follows the modern appearance of such applications as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, and look-and-feels such as Nimbus and Quaqua (which follows Mac Aqua).

Here is another “old” screenshot of Creme skin:

And here is how it looks now:

The last couple of “before” and “after” come from the Autumn skin. The “before”:

and the “after”:

While this brings more modern look to the tabbed panes, some application may require additional control over the content pane border. This is what the new TABBED_PANE_CONTENT_BORDER_KIND client property is for. The default value is TabContentPaneBorderKind.DOUBLE_FULL which is what the next screenshot (and the screenshots above) show:

In order to use the old painting, use the TabContentPaneBorderKind.SINGLE_FULL value:

If you have nested tabbed panes, you can use either TabContentPaneBorderKind.DOUBLE_PLACEMENT value:

or the TabContentPaneBorderKind.SINGLE_PLACEMENT value:

Thanks to Luke Sleeman for opening an enhancement request that prompted this functionality.

The second feature is the reworked support for lock icons on non-editable text fields and editable comboboxes with model-only auto-completion. Up until now, Substance added a lock icon in the bottom left corner of such components unless you used the NO_EXTRA_ELEMENTS property, which is kind of an overkill for this. The latest 4.1dev drop of Substance (which bundles the latest 3.2dev drop of Laf-Widget) adds a new LafWidget.NO_LOCK_ICON client property that allows controlling the presence of lock icon for a specific component.

In addition, Kamil Paral has requested a very useful enhancement: when you wrap a non-editable text area in a scroll pane, the icon only appears when you scroll all the way down. And so, in this case, the latest drop paints the lock icon just above the horizontal scroll bar. You can read about the implementation limitations in the enhancement report, but i’ll sum up two shortcomings:

• If you scroll horizontally, the icon will disappear – it is bound to the left border of the wrapped component.
• The scroll mode is switched from BLIT to SIMPLE which might affect the scrolling performance.

If these shortcomings make this feature undesirable, use the NO_LOCK_ICON on that specific component and set it to Boolean.FALSE.