Carsten says in the comments to my previous posting:

all very nice and well, but from a business point of view right now the only interesting LnFs for me are Gtk and Windows XP. why are you missing both those two of all LnFs? makes me wonder…

Allow me to reiterate the last section in that entry:

i can go on and on with the screenshots, but you get the point. It can run under any core or third party look-and-feel without any special tricks in the application code and without writing any LAF-specific rendering

And to illustrate this, here are the components under Windows look-and-feel in Windows XP:

And the same components under GTK look-and-feel in Ubuntu 7.10:

As you can see, these look-and-feels are fully supported, including matching the fonts, desktop text rendering hints and dynamic layout that scales and adjusts with the font settings.

After quite a few months of preparations and planning, the Flamingo component suite project has a formal vision. Here is the list of goals for the version 3.0 that will be released in February 2008.

• To provide a small and cohesive set of powerful UI components that allow creating modern applications that provide visual functionality similar to or superseding that of Vista Explorer and Office 2007.
• To provide out-of-the-box consistent look across existing and future core and third-party look-and-feels with any specific application or implementation coding.
• To allow third-party look-and-feel vendors to change the appearance and behavior of the components according to the functionality of the specific look-and-feel (for example, animations).
• To respect the DPI settings of the current look-and-feel, scaling the components as necessary to account for different base font sizes.
• To follow the core Swing guidelines in the external APIs and the internal implementation details to ease the learning curve for users, developers and look-and-feel implementors.
• To provide clean and maintainable blueprints for creating custom production-ready third-party Swing components.

In order to meet these goals, the following changes will be made for the first source and binary drops of Flamingo 3.0dev that will be available early next week:

• The minimum requirement for the release 3.0 will be JDK 6.0.
• Components that do not conform to the first goal (such as wizard, file viewer and message dialog) will be removed from the distribution.
• The package structure, public APIs and class names will be changed to conform to the last goal.

In doing so, i’m following the three principles outlined by Seth Godin for small business success:

• Removing the functionality that was either partially or poorly implemented and not ready for production use.
• Willing to introduce binary incompatibilities and higher minimum requirements for greater long-term gain for both the project and the community.
• Believing that while other component vendors do not provide the target components, they cover the majority of other functionality required from modern Swing applications.

There hasn’t been a lot of new content on this blog over the past three weeks, and this entry is just to keep you in sync with what you can expect from the next development drop of the Flamingo component suite.

Here is a partial screenshot of the controls (ribbon, buttons and galleries) under the Metal / Ocean look and feel:

Here is the same component under Windows look and feel in Vista:

And under the Windows Classic look and feel:

What about Nimbus? Here it is:

What about the Looks family? Here it is under Looks Plastic XP:

And how about Synthetica? Here it is under Synthetica Blue Ice

and Synthetica Mauve Metallic:

And here it is under Pagosoft look and feel:

And here it is under Squareness look and feel:

OK, i can go on and on with the screenshots, but you get the point. It can run under any core or third party look-and-feel without any special tricks in the application code and without writing any LAF-specific rendering. Stay tuned for more over the next few days.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the official release for version 4.1 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Lima). 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.

Applications that use or implement custom border painters and title painters should consult the instructions in the migration guide.

In addition to the core release, 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 525 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.

The documentation has been updated with the latest visuals and APIs. In addition, there are new tutorials on Substance painters and skinning of custom components.
Special thanks for bug reporting and testing go to Mikael Grev, Vincent Trussart, Kamil Paral, Klaus Rheinwald and Jean-Francois Poilpret.

A few screenshots of the new functionality in Substance 4.1:

The inner border painters and tab pane content borders in the Raven Graphite Glass skin:

The new Creme Coffee skin:

Full support for desktop resolution settings:

Automatic font policy for Gnome desktops: