Chet Haase's Blog

Mustang, Swing, and NetBeans on Windows Vista: Looking Good!

I've been playing around with the Windows Vista Beta1 release lately, seeing how we're doing for compatibility and native look and feel. There are some minor issues that need to be fixed, but in general we're looking great. It's a nice confirmation of the changes we made in Mustang to use the uxtheme APIs in Windows to render our widgets for the Windows look & feel; we didn't need to make any changes to our code to make our widgets look correct on Vista versus XP.

Today, I installed the latest daily build of NetBeans 4.2 to see how it looked. You can see the results by clicking on this screenshot:

If you look closely, you can see that some of the text areas in the latest NetBeans bits are taking advantage of the LCD Text support we've implemented in Mustang.

By request, here are some screenshots of SwingSet2 on Mustang on Vista, running with the native look and feel; this should give you a sense of how native the controls look so far (click on the thumbnails to see a larger picture):

There are some issues to be resolved, such as the rectangular windows decorations (JInternalFrame has square buttons) and some mouseover effects that we are not yet capturing. But things are looking pretty good in general.

And remember that you can always download the latest Mustang snapshot to try out these nifty experiments yourself.

Caveats for the images above:

• Some browsers have awful support for PNG images, so if the pixels look really distorted in your browser you may try downloading the image and viewing it in an image viewing app instead. I had good luck with Firefox 1.0.7.
• The LCD text looks good on the particular display on which I took the snapshot. If you are not viewing this on an LCD display, or if your display has a very different configuration than mine, you will get different visual quality. The app running on your system would look good, but a screenshot of the app running on my system is a different thing entirely....

Comments

• Lovely. Brings it almost into the same century as OSX.
  Almost.

  Posted by: goron on August 30, 2005 at 04:04 PM

• I agree that the text in the menus and in the tree looks good.

  However the text in the java class isn't so clear. I guess that it used to be worse than that but in my opinion this is not yet it.

  The text in bold blask is particularly bad. For example, in "setupFirstScreen()" I see a little pixel on top of the u that should not be there. The same happens with other letters in other words.

  Maybe it's a problem with the font.

  I'm look in the image in Mozilla.

  PS: please design a new icon for the java class, it is not particulary pretty. It is so "pixelized".

  Posted by: urddd on August 30, 2005 at 10:34 PM

• Who answer me ? What with #bug4479178 - RFE: Support for Transparent windows required and Non-Rectangular Windows. Is a chance to realize it in Mustang ? It is very important ref. in my opinion.
  

  Posted by: majo44 on August 31, 2005 at 02:22 AM

• Is the text in the JTree using the LCD Text stuff? It looks very pixellated, particularly when looking at the "A" characters.

  Posted by: burke_e on August 31, 2005 at 04:06 AM

• 
  goron: Maybe I wasn't clear enough. This blog/screenshot wasn't about whether this desktop or app looks cool, but whether this app looks at home on the desktop. We get hammered constantly about how our "native look & feel" compares to the native desktop. What I was trying to illustrate was not the particular features involved in this look & feel, but the fact that we look like we belong on this Beta desktop.

  urddd: See my reply to burke_e below for the pixelated text. As for pixels that seem out of place, there are still font rasterization bugs that we know of that we are working on in Mustang.

  burke_e: You're right, there are some instances of non-anti-aliased text in this image. This was my first run of this build of NetBeans on this build of Mustang on this build of Vista; i don't know what the issues are here yet...
  

  Posted by: chet on August 31, 2005 at 06:54 AM

• Actually, speaking of Windows Vista again rather than swing uxtheming (although that's nice), notice that the window border's not just translucent. It actually blurs the background. And the window title is even readable due to the nice gradient contrast around the text.

  On the down side, those window control buttons (close, maximize, minimize) are too small of mouse targets for my taste. And there really should be space between close and maximize.

  Posted by: tjpalmer on August 31, 2005 at 08:55 AM

• Compared to the Eclipse screenshot on

  http://www.eclipsezone.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/18110-44199-91918659-2066/eclipse_on_vista_snap.png

  this one looks a little bit more .... native?
  

  Posted by: sumitkishore on August 31, 2005 at 09:12 AM

• Speaking of new things: any chase they will get WebStart working w/ 64 bit windows?

  .V
  http://roomity.com

  Posted by: netsql on August 31, 2005 at 09:21 AM

• tjpalmer: Actually, all of the elements you mentioned (translucent borders, blurring, and window control buttons) come from the Windows desktop itself, not uxtheme (or Swing at all). We control everything inside the window frame, but the desktop toolkit controls the frame itself (unless you tell Swing to create an undecorated frame, of course). And the miniscule size of those control buttons is a factor of the theme/appearance settings on my desktop; you can change those and the Swing frame would react accordingly.

  Posted by: chet on August 31, 2005 at 10:09 AM

• ehm, that LCD text antialiasing.. is well.. below expectations... although the text does look much better than before.. it still appears to be quite jagged... or maybe it's just the font you are using... and then again the filenames in the project pane don't seem to be rendered correctly at all..

  Posted by: rizzix on August 31, 2005 at 10:15 AM

• oops.. nevermind.

  Posted by: rizzix on August 31, 2005 at 10:17 AM

• The source code window is using LCD anti-aliasing, but the Projects window on the left is not. Is there any way of getting Netbeans to use LCD AA throughout all its screens?

  Posted by: rogerhernandez on August 31, 2005 at 04:33 PM

• That's great, but what the Java community should really be concerned about is how we plan to keep up with Microsoft's declarative user interface language XAML, and their rendering engine.

  Posted by: ybakos on September 04, 2005 at 08:09 PM

• Nice...

  Looks like the LCD text is missing on the Projects tree and tab title though :)

  Posted by: applebanana8 on September 06, 2005 at 06:25 PM

• ybakos:

  Different strokes for different folks; some people care deeply about things like XAML and rich GUI effects, others don't care about that but do care deeply about native look & feel fidelity.
  Me? I care about all of it. This blog entry was all about native look & feel, but that doesn't mean we're not thinking about other areas of desktop development...

  Posted by: chet on September 09, 2005 at 11:55 AM

• Any chance that an article entitled:

  Mustang, Swing, and NetBeans on Mac OS X

  might be as enthusiastic?

  I find Java's file dialog drifting so far from Mac as to make using Java/Swing GUIs on Mac pretty depressing. To Mac folks, Java seems pretty Windows-centric.

  Got any words of hope?

  Owen

  Posted by: backspaces on October 18, 2005 at 08:47 AM

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