Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Substance 4.2 official release

It gives me great pleasure to announce the official release for version 4.2 of Substance look-and-feel (code-named Memphis). The list of new features includes:

• Support for native text rendering in the Bramble plugin.
• Support for component colorization with the new SubstanceLookAndFeel.COLORIZATION_FACTOR client property.
• Font policy for KDE desktops.
• More streamlined visuals of arrow buttons for combo boxes and spinners.
• New visuals for Office Blue 2007, Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass skins that provide better blending for disabled controls and more consistent painting of check marks.
• Cleaner and more streamlined appearance of tables (including tables wrapped in scroll panes)
• Auto-dispose of tab overview dialog.

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

• Substance SwingX plugin for the build 795 of SwingX component suite.
• Substance Baseline plugin for release 1.0.2 of Swing-Layout project.
• Substance NetBeans module for release 6.0 of NetBeans IDE.
• Substance button shaper pack.
• Substance theme pack.
• Substance watermark pack.

A few screenshots of the new functionality in Substance 4.2:

Support for native text rasterization (viewed here with Segoe UI 12 pixel font under Windows Vista on JDK 5.0):

Component colorization with 50% factor (both background and foreground):

Respecting the KDE desktop font settings:

Better visuals for disabled controls under Raven Graphite skin:

Removing visual noise on tables and table headers in scroll panes:

Comments

• Thanks a million for this look & feel! Also the NetBeans plugin is really cool. When talking about NetBeans RCP people keep asking how to create an appliction, that is based on NetBeans RCP, but doesn't look like NetBeans. Your plugin is part of the answer. I blogged about it here.

  Posted by: maxnitribitt on February 05, 2008 at 12:48 AM

• Great job Kirill. I like Substance look and feel but the only thing holding me off is the high memory usage of the look and feel, it takes around 20-30MB more RAM.

  Posted by: carcour on February 05, 2008 at 07:18 AM

• Toni, thanks for the link and the description on how to use Substance module in NetBeans RCP applications.
  Carcour - this would be your decision. Without the image caches, Substance-based applications would bring the system to a complete crawl. I don't know about you, but at this very time i have 13 applications running on my desktop that use more than 20MB of RAM.

  Posted by: kirillcool on February 05, 2008 at 10:38 AM

• Kirill what I mean is that my application takes more than 20MB of additional RAM with Substance Look and Feel. I have to admit though that it's gorgeous, OS look and feel looks very ugly.
  Carl

  Posted by: carcour on February 05, 2008 at 10:56 AM

• Carl, i understand the concern about the extra RAM footprint. But in the tradeoff between the visuals and the extra memory for image caches, Substance is designed to choose the visuals.
  Thanks, Kirill

  Posted by: kirillcool on February 05, 2008 at 05:45 PM

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