Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

July 2007 Archives

Substance module will be supported in NetBeans 6.0

I’m very happy to report that NetBeans developers have unrolled the changes that broke the Substance NetBeans module (reported in early May on NetBeans bug tracker). And so, if you’re using the daily builds of NetBeans 6.0 (after July 26th), you can install the latest development drop of Substance 4.0 module (code-named Key Largo).

Many thanks to NetBeans team and Standa Aubrecht in particular for listening to the community and making these changes that allow third-party look-and-feels to provide modules for both NetBeans IDE itself and NetBeans RCP programs. Standa was courteous enough to provide a patch that removes usage of deprecated APIs and unnecessary functionality. The only minor defect that will be fixed in the consistent appearance for tab scroll buttons.

Cross-posted at Pushing Pixels.

OSCON 2007 - presentation slides and stray thoughts

First of all, thanks to all those who came to listen to my presentation yesterday at OSCON 2007. The presentation slides are available in the PowerPoint2007 and PDF formats. I'm also planning a series of articles on my other blog to go more deeply into the various parts of the Swing painting pipeline.

And now some stray thoughts that went through my head on the plane back as i started comparing OSCON with JavaOne

• Much better organization of connectivity and power supplies. Quite a few big tables outside the session rooms where you can plug your laptop to an outlet and connect to the internet with a hard wire. Not to mention that the session rooms had extension cords with outlets under the chairs, with a decent (15-20 KBs) WiFi access.
• No standing in line to get in the sessions. Arguably, there are less people at the conference, but everybody is entitled to go and sit on the floor when they pay four figures to go to the conference.
• Much more girls / women at OSCON. Perhaps Java needs to borrow some sex-appeal from other languages :)

And it was nice to see a friendly face at the conference itself and at the airport (both our flights were delayed, which gave me a chance to start reading the "Beautiful code", which is for now very disappointing).

Flurry of activity

I guess it's because of all the free evenings one gets during the summer (the hit TV shows take long breaks, and not too many major DVD releases), so i've been pretty busy over at Pushing Pixels, writing about the new functionality in the Substance and its plugin for SwingX.

There are a few new skins in the latest 4.0dev drops, Magma, Autumn, Mist Silver, Mist Aqua, Nebula and Nebula Brick Wall described here.

The "Support for SwingX components" series shows screenshots and videos of SwingX components under the latest drops of 4.0dev:

• The first part shows the support for JXTaskPaneContainer and JXTaskPane.
• The second part shows the support for JXStatusBar.
• The third part shows the support for JXTitledPanel.
• The fourth part shows the support for JXTipOfTheDay.
• The fifth part shows the support for JXLoginPanel.
• The sixth part shows the support for JXMonthView.
• The seventh part shows the support for JXHeader.
• The eighth part shows the support for JXErrorPane.

The "Advanced animations on core Swing components" series takes a deeper look into the enhancements made to the built-in animation layer:

• The first part shows rollover and selection background animations on menus, sliders, tables and table headers
• The second part shows rollover foreground animations on menus under a skin that uses dark background fill on menubars
• The third part shows rollover and selection background and foreground animations under a mixed dark-light theme
• The fourth part shows rollover and selection background and foreground animations under the new Magma skin

The Advanced animations on SwingX components brings these two series together, showing the animations on the JXMonthView component.

Also, i have a brand new article on java.net on auto-completion support on Swing comboboxes using GlazedLists, JIDE, SwingX and Laf-Widget. Many thanks to James Lemieux of GlazedLists, David Qiao of JIDE and Chris Adamson of java.net for reviewing this article.

Last but not the least, next Wednesday i'm going to present a session on Swing advanced effects at the OSCON 2007 conference. If you're there, drop in to learn a thing or two about the Swing rendering pipeline and its extension points that allow you to hook the custom painting functionality.

A silly trick with JavaScript

Here is a silly trick that a friend of mine has sent me. Copy the following JavaScript bit and paste it to the address bar of your browse (for some reason it doesn't work on this specific page, so try it one the main java.net page for instance). Enjoy the ride :)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.