Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Substance 4.1 official release

It gives me great pleasure to announce the official release for version 4.1 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Lima). The list of new features includes:

• Full HiDPI support (part 1, part 2, part 3).
• Font policy for Gnome desktops.
• API for installing a scaled font policy.
• New Creme Coffee skin.
• Inner border painters.
• New visuals for tabbed pane content border.
• Transition-aware animating icons for control icons.
• New version of Xoetrope color wheel for the color chooser component.
• Better visuals for the JRibbon component (part 1, part 2, part 3) in the Substance Flamingo plugin.
• Support for the GroupLayout baseline functionality in the Substance Baseline plugin.

Applications that use or implement custom border painters and title painters should consult the instructions in the migration guide.

In addition to the core release, the following Substance plugins and modules have been updated as well:

• Substance Flamingo plugin for the latest 2.1dev drop of Flamingo component suite.
• Substance SwingX plugin for the build 255 of SwingX component suite.
• Substance Baseline plugin for release 1.0.2 of Swing-Layout project.
• Substance NetBeans module for 6.0beta2 of NetBeans IDE.

The documentation has been updated with the latest visuals and APIs. In addition, there are new tutorials on Substance painters and skinning of custom components. Special thanks for bug reporting and testing go to Mikael Grev, Vincent Trussart, Kamil Paral, Klaus Rheinwald and Jean-Francois Poilpret.

A few screenshots of the new functionality in Substance 4.1:

The inner border painters and tab pane content borders in the Raven Graphite Glass skin:

The new Creme Coffee skin:

Full support for desktop resolution settings:

Automatic font policy for Gnome desktops:

Comments

• Looks great, especially the inner border painters.
  Good work.

  Posted by: goron on November 12, 2007 at 06:20 AM

• Thanks :)

  Posted by: kirillcool on November 12, 2007 at 04:03 PM

• thanks a lot !
  i made a simple java chat applet and i have two little question

  1: is there a way to disable substance with popup window (tooltip)
  because i use tooltip, and when they are going a little out from the applet panel, i have nice shadow but ugly "java applet window" title

  2: i work on gnome, and when someone use my applet on windows, well the font is not the same :( ... when i do the dev it is nice, and when i see the result on Windows it's ugly (too big, buttons that are one on the other ...)

  i hope you'll answer me
  and once again thanks for this wonderful work !

  Posted by: alain57 on January 13, 2008 at 11:18 PM

• i forgot to tell, i use a simple tooltip on a JList element
  here is a screenshot to show the difference (sorry, mouse cursor isn't visible on screenshot, don't know why )
  here is the tooltip normaland
  here is the tooltip with shadow and ugly title

  Posted by: alain57 on January 13, 2008 at 11:31 PM

• Alain -
  Does the same behavior (tooltips with "java applet window") happen under core look-and-feels (Metal / Window)? Does it happen under JGoodies Looks (the popup shadows in Substance are taken from there)?

  About the font differences - Substance respects the desktop font settings (font family, font style and font size), so by default your application will use different fonts under different operating systems. You can use the setFontPolicy API to set a custom font policy - then your application will look the same under all platforms (if you use a font that is present on those), but on the other hand it will look out of place on most of them. My best advice would be to check the layout manager that you're using, and how your application "copes" with bigger fonts and different font families. Also, note that version 4.2 (near the RC stage) provides better lookup for desktop-consistent fonts under Gnome.

  Thanks, Kirill

  Posted by: kirillcool on January 13, 2008 at 11:40 PM

• thx for fast answer.
  I tryed setFont api and it work ^^ one problem less :)

  under normal look-and-feel (on windows and linux) it shows the tooltip normal even when they go a little out from the applet panel

  i didn't try JGoodies yet, because i never needed it. maybe i will try it soon...

  to be sure i didn't done a mistake, i will recompile my applet and try the tooltip and of course do screenshots :)

  really hope someone (you ? me ? or other reader ?) will find the solution ...

  Posted by: alain57 on January 14, 2008 at 05:29 AM

• i confirm was i said with a little screenshot here
  with default look and feel no ugly title ...

  Posted by: alain57 on January 14, 2008 at 05:52 AM

• checked with jgoodies looks same problem :(

  Posted by: alain57 on January 14, 2008 at 07:31 AM

• well i did it
  simply removed all that jgoodies stuff
  the contrib/com directory
  and 3 lines in SubstanceLookAndFeel.java

  Posted by: alain57 on January 14, 2008 at 08:04 AM

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