Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Animating layouts part IV - demo

This is the fourth part in a series about automatically animated layouts in Swing applications.

• The first part introduced the TransitionLayout. This part showed animated versions of BorderLayout and FlowLayout.
• The second part showed the TransitionLayout applied to a (at least partially) real-world image viewer that allows live thumbnail resizing.
• The thirs part described the current implementation and alternatives that were considered.

On Tuesday the party is over (the wife and the baby get back home from a long overseas trip) and it's less than an hour before the Sunday night football. What does it mean? Not much time left :)

Click on the link below to launch a test application that shows different capabilities of the TransitionLayout (that has since been modified to handle multiple tracking). The application has three TransitionLayouts installed:

• The first is on the tabbed pane itself, allowing cross-fades on tab selection (with no change to application code apart from installing the layout manager).
• The second one is on the top panel of the first tab (buttons 1, 2 and 3).
• The third one is on the bottom panel of the first tab (buttons 4, 5 and 6).

Use Add buttons on the first tab to add the buttons - note the cross-fade effects. Use the checkboxes to select the visibility of the buttons and click Toggle button to initiate the transition fades / animations. The source for this application is right here.

Comments

• Kirill, I _like_ the checkbox/radio select effects. Never thought about doing that.

  Posted by: wsnyder6 on September 25, 2006 at 07:15 AM

• Just a short word of apreciation.
  I have used Substance for about a year now in various projects, and this new gimmy, the transition layout, you pulled out of the sleeve is just plain great.
  I were about to implement a kind of colapsable panel, just like a JPanel, but where the editor takes up more space (the cell expands) than the renderer, and the transitionlayout has greatly helped me make the user understand what is happening when the cell expands.

  Keep on the good work

  Posted by: akobberup on September 25, 2006 at 01:32 PM

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