Simon Morris's Blog

March 2007 Archives

Getting Animated

Well, given feedback from around the web it seems a lot of people liked my recent little foray into the realm of Swing eye candy, which is both very flattering, and also rather worrying. Do so many of you really value GUI bling?

I continued to play about with the code after I last posted it, and the final (for now!) bling'd up version can be WebStart'd from the link below. I must warn you, it takes eye candy to new depths of pointlessness! But these little experiments were never about testing the appropriateness or otherwise of various effects in a user facing GUI. Instead I was attempting to assess how easy it is to pull off such effects using bog-standard AWT/Swing API calls.

I found Swing highly compliant, which was reassuring. Instead the bulk of the head-scratching went not on getting Swing to 'swing', but on the custom PLaF and the movement mechanics behind the transitions. The movement mechanics in particular required a lot of boilerplate code.

In the end I wrote a mini API for tracking movement over time, and it was this utility API which proved to be far far more interesting than the main Swing code itself. So, despite the presence of rival animation solutions, I found myself drawn towards tinkering with this mini library, and eventually went back to the drawing board, rebuilding the code from scratch to be more universal and tighter in design.

The rest of this article will look at the results via a little trial animation I crafted.

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