Following the work that has been done to revisit and polish the Office Blue skin of Substance look-and-feel closer to the original visuals, the last two weeks have seen major improvements in the Office Silver skin that bring it closer to the Office 2007 visuals as well.

Here is a screenshot of the old Office Silver skin:

While the overall direction is right (grays + a combination of yellow / orange colors for active states), it quite far from the original visuals.

Here is how it looks in the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama):

To see the new Office Silver skin in action on the Flamingo ribbon component, run the following WebStart demo and switch to Office Silver in the Look & Feel task:

If you want to test new visuals and APIs, you will need to take the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama). Release candidate for Substance is scheduled for January 26 and the final release is scheduled for February 9.

The Office Blue skin in Substance look-and-feel has already been reworked to be closer to the original Office 2007 visuals, and this work has continued over the last two weeks to provide an even better visual match.

Here is how the sample Flamingo ribbon application looked like under Office Blue two weeks ago:

and here is how it looks now:

The incomplete list of visual tweaks includes:

• Glass subdued gradient on the title pane
• More fidelity in glass gradients on active (rollover, selected, pressed, armed) buttons
• More fidelity in border gradients
• More fidelity and subdued glass gradient on the ribbon bands
• Less contrast between text and arrow color on ribbon command buttons
• Subdued foreground color of ribbon band footer panels
• Better contrast between ribbon band content and ribbon band footer panel
• Colorizing icons of disabled ribbon components

This is still work in progress, but in the meantime you’re welcome to take the latest 5.1dev drop of core Substance (code-named Panama) and the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin. Release candidate for Substance is scheduled for January 26 and the final release is scheduled for February 9.

A few months ago, this posting on the Substance users mailing list has asked for better color matching of icons on disabled buttons. If you do not use the AbstractButton.setDisabledIcon API, the implementation of AbstractButton.getDisabledIcon uses the LookAndFeel.getDisabledIcon to create a disabled icon based on the current button icon. The default implementation of this method uses the GrayFilter class, which, while adequate for the core look-and-feels and most Substance skins, fails short for colored skins such as Autumn or Office Blue.

This has been addressed in the latest 5.1dev drop of the core Substance library. The screenshot below shows how a disabled button looked prior to these changes under Autumn skin (the copy button on the left):

And here is how it looks now:

Here is how the disabled icon looked like under Office Blue before:

And here is how it looks now:

In addition to using the color schemes of the current Substance skin, the new implementation also results in better fidelity to the original icon (especially visible under Autumn above).

Another change in the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance is much better support for themed icons. First introduced about two years ago, and revisited for Flamingo command buttons, it now supports a wider range of core Swing components and provides better rollover animations for Flamingo buttons.

Enabled by using the USE_DEFAULT_THEMED_ICONS client property, it was previously supported only on buttons and toggle buttons. This has been extended to labels, menus, menu items and tabs, along with removing support for per-component configuration. It is now a global property that can be installed on the UIManager.

The new implementation that better preserves the details of icons on disabled buttons also results in crisper and more recognizable icon details for the themed mode. Here is how the themed icons looked before under Autumn:

and here is how it looks now:

Here is how the themed icons looked before under Office Blue (almost unrecognizable, since the color schemes are very washed):

and here is how it looks now:

The support for themed mode has been reworked for Flamingo command buttons as well, bringing them in line with both the visuals and the rollover animation sequences (see the movie below). Here is a screenshot of the ribbon under Office Blue with full color icons:

and here is the same ribbon under the themed mode:

To illustrate the themed mode and rollover sequences in action, click on the following movie:

To see the themed Flamingo ribbon component in action, run the following WebStart demo and select the Use themed icons in the bottom right part of the application:

If you want to test the disabled and themed icons in your applications, you would need the following (the last two only for applications using Flamingo components):

• The latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama)
• The latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo (code-named Fainnear)
• The latest 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin

If you’re following my Twitter stream, you know that over the last few days i have been working to bring the Office Blue skin of Substance look-and-feel closer to the original visuals. The original visuals for Office 2007 built-in skins are comprised of hundreds of hand-crafted images and around 1500 colors, and are quite a challenge to reproduce even with the rich skinning APIs of Substance.

Here is a screenshot of the old Office Blue skin:

While the overall direction is right (washed blues + a combination of yellow / orange colors for active states), it was quite off in both hue and saturation.

Here is how it looks in the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama):

Office Blue skin is by far the most complicated Substance skin, and uncovered deficiencies in the core library as far as the skinning flexibility goes. The most visible change is breaking the API of highlight painters to add two new parameters (for passing the border color schemes). All the other changes are additive, bringing more control over the definition of color scheme bundles.

You can now associate the following three new types of color schemes with each component state (see the SubstanceColorSchemeBundle and OfficeBlue2007Skin for more details):

• Color schemes for marks (check marks, arrow icons, …)
• Color schemes for tabs (see the white fill of the selected tab)
• Border color schemes for tabs (run the WebStart demo below and move the mouse over the selected tab to see the orange glow)

At the present moment, the Office Blue skin is defined by fifteen different color schemes that cover thirty six different component state configurations. Additional color schemes may be added later to further tweak the visuals.

As with Substance 5.0, performance is the major factor. Adding the new color scheme kinds and component state combinations introduces about 0.8% performance degradation to the skins that do not use them, and about 2.1% to the skins that do. I do believe that the new fine tuned control over defining the visual aspects of your custom skins is worth it, and i will try to bring the numbers down until the final 5.1 release (set to coincide with the final 4.0 release of Flamingo).

The final piece is a new visual tool to assist in defining Substance color schemes based on the existing designs. It is called Jitterbug and will be properly introduced next week. You can create a new color scheme with Jitterbug in under a minute, and all fifteen color schemes of the new Office Blue skin were created with it.

To see the new Office Blue skin in action on the Flamingo ribbon component, run the following WebStart demo:

If you want to test new visuals and APIs, you will need to take the latest 5.1dev drop of Substance (code-named Panama).