Joshua Marinacci's Blog

Pretty Pictures

I'm doing lots of pre-JavaOne work right now and I could easily bore you with details of our Java.net Community Leaders meeting on Saturday, but instead I'll tease you with our demo.

Rich, Romain and I put together a really great demo application using Desktop Java and a lot of cool APIs. We showed it at Licensee Day this morning and it went swimmingly so I have high hopes for the full presentation tomorrow during the Tuesday morning General Session. I can't tell you any more details, but you'll know it when you see it. After the demo on stage we'll activate a page on java.net for you to get a closer look.

Okay, so that was another tease. To tide you over until tomorrow I'll show you some screenshots of a new framework I'm working on for SwingLabs. Called the Overlay Framework, it will make a lot of complex effects ridiculously easy. Want to draw a translucent badge on top of any textfield with invalid data? Just stuff a painter into the ValidationOverlay and it will take care of the rest. Want to do drag and drop with translucent previews? It'll be just a couple of lines of code with the GhostDragOverlay.

For a couple of years I've been playing around with this idea of a magnifying glass that would work on any application. Well this weekend I finally sat down to write it. I think it came out pretty well. What do you think:

Yes, it is really magnifying anything in the frame under the glass. Yes, Swing apps really can look good! All of this code and more will be available in SwingLabs just as soon as JavaOne is over and I take a week of rest. Until then, keep watching the blogs!

Comments

• Very nice, Josh! I've been thinking for awhile that the magnifying glass and other overlays could be useful for developers fine-tuning a layout--e.g. enable the ui introspection tools and use the magnifying glass, a grid control, a ruler, color controls, etc. to "verify" the UI. I've also thought one could do that to show things like data binding, e.g. what field or model a given control is bound to--similar to what the Firefox Web Developer extension is able to do with CSS.

  Nice work--looking forward to seeing it in the labs.

  Patrick

  Posted by: pdoubleya on May 16, 2006 at 06:40 AM

• Wow! Very nice!

  Posted by: evickroy on May 16, 2006 at 02:38 PM

• Even sexier than Pixie!

  Posted by: jessewilson on May 17, 2006 at 08:01 AM

• Thanks. Don't worry, I've got another (non-glasspane) component coming that will do the same type of general screen magnification that Pixie does.

  Posted by: joshy on May 17, 2006 at 12:54 PM

• I know, I'm a slacker. I keep forgetting to post the code. Here it is guys. I'm sorry it took so long.

  Be warned that there is extra code in there, part of a glasspane framework I keep playing around with. The code you want is in the glasspanemanager.MagGlassOverlay class. Enjoy!

  Posted by: joshy on July 18, 2006 at 09:12 AM

• It is very interesting.
  A very nice improvement and also a vey useful one would be to move the bigger lens around the smaller one, so when the small lens it's pointing in the top left corner, the big lens will be visible to the buttom right.
  I may try to do this, if I will find the time.
  

  Posted by: dpmihai on August 04, 2006 at 02:13 AM

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