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 clear and well-defined set of goals is crucial for projects of all sizes, and Substance is no exception. The project goal has been refined and refocused to guide the project throughout the year 2009 and is:

To provide a rock solid, fast and extensible library for creating visually appealing and consistent Swing applications

To provide a little bit more details:

• Rock solid – the goal is to continue providing production-quality collection of skins with foremost focus on handling bug reports and maintaining long term health of the source code base.
• Fast – the goal is to continue focusing on the performance aspects, making sure that code changes do not introduce any performance regressions and continuously analyzing the existing code paths for additional performance improvements. Project LightBeam is an integral part of the development process, which has already seen an average additional improvement of 3.3% in version 5.1dev as compared to the latest stable 5.0 release.
• Extensible – the goal is to provide a focused and powerful set of APIs to create and tweak custom visuals as mandated by the design mockups of specific applications. Documentation on Substance skins, painters and the sample blueprints provides detailed information on how to use Substance to implement even the most demanding modern designs.
• Visually appealing – the goal is to provide a selected collection of core Substance color schemes, painters and skins that can be used without any change in application code. Each core skin pays close attention to visual polish and the current desktop configuration, including font and DPI settings.
• Consistent – the goal is to enforce visual consistency across different UI areas. The grouping of visual aspects based on component states, decoration areas and the newly added color scheme associations facilitates richness and flexibility between the different UI areas, at the same time enforcing visual consistency and connections across the components in related areas and states.

These five areas will be the main driving factors behind the continuing development of Substance look-and-feel in year 2009.

This has not been an easy decision to make, but unfortunately the reality sometimes interferes with our best intentions. I regrettably can no longer find time to continue maintaining Flamingo documentation and Swing Links of the Week trail on this blog.

About half a year ago our family has grown, and i have created an Amazon wishlist to allow the users of my projects to express their thanks and support the ongoing efforts being put into them. While i am thankful for the few gifts that i have received via this program (and one weird conversation about relative merits of one of the items on the list), this has not proven to be as sustainable as i hoped it to be.

Something has to go, and while documentation is still high on my list of priorities, i need to be realistic. The quasi-guiltware approach did not work, and Flamingo does not have (yet) enough users to justify the initial upfront investment in writing paid documentation (a-la JFreeChart). So, if you want to use Flamingo components (ribbon and friends), you will have to dig into the code.

The same goes for Swing Links of the Week. After more than a year of running this weekly trail, it is time to stop. You can find most of the links at DZone, JavaBlogs and java.net forums. You’ll just have to spend a little bit more time doing so :)

Jitterbug is a visual editor for creating and editing color schemes in Substance look-and-feel. It primarily addresses the scenarios where you need to translate design mockups or emulate existing UI visuals as a Substance skin. Created during the rework of the Office Blue skin, it was used to create and refine all seventeen color schemes currently used in this skin.

The following screenshot shows Jitterbug in action (click to see full size view):

To see the Jitterbug in action, run the following signed WebStart demo:

Here i would like to ask for your feedback. This tool was created to scratch my own itch – it was getting quite tedious creating and tweaking color schemes. I did try to make both flows straightforward and intuitive. However, i cannot be an objective judge of my own creation. As such, i am not detailing any instructions on how to use Jitterbug. If you find yourself stuck in the middle of the process, or the flows do not simply make sense, let me know in the comments.