The recent drops of Substance plugin for SwingX components started providing extensive and consistent support for the popular third-party component suite backed up by Sun. This plugin contains UI delegates that provide consistent look and feel for the SwingX components, including theming, watermarking, skinning and animation effects.

The first part in this series will showcase the support for JXTaskPaneContainer and JXTaskPane. The test application itself can be found in the CVS repository of Substance SwingX plugin, and here are a few screenshots of this application under different Substance skins.

Here is the task pane container (the bottom task pane is collapsed) under Business skin:

Here is the same task pane container under Business Black Steel skin:

Here is the same task pane container under Business Blue Steel skin:

Here is the same task pane container under Nebula skin:

Here is the same task pane container under Nebula Brick Wall skin:

Here is the same task pane container under Raven skin:

Here is the same task pane container under Magma skin:

As you can see, Substance picks up the painter used to paint the title bar and the menu bar (if necessary) to paint the task pane container as well, providing a seamless and consistent appearance for the third-party component. In addition, as with the core Swing components, Substance provides rollover animation effects on the task pane title (click Play to start):

The latest drop of Substance 4.0dev (code-named Key Largo) features four new experimental toned down skins. These join the existing skins described here (Sahara, Moderate, Business and Creme) and here (Business Blue Steel, Business Black Steel, Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass). The new skins are:

Nebula which uses the colors of Nimbus and the title painter inspired by the Orange Metallic theme of Synthetica:

Nebula Brick Wall which uses the colors of Nimbus and an orange title painter inspired by the Orange Metallic theme of Synthetica:

Mist Silver which uses gray colors and header painter inspired by Safari:

Mist Aqua which uses aqua colors and header painter inspired by Safari:

Note that these are experimental and subject to change throughout the rest of the development cycle. You’re more than welcome to test them on your application and provide feedback. In addition, a few existing skins have been tweaked a little in the header portion. The Business skin line uses a slight touch of brushed metal:

And the header painters of Office skin line have been changed to use softer brushed metal painters as well: