Wow, it’s September already! This year is flying by, and JavaOne is right on the door step. This week there is a bunch of interesting news, in both the Swing and JavaFX worlds.

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov this week announced that he was suspending support for his Substance, Flamingo, Trident and related projects. He has shifted his spare-time focus in recent months to JavaScript-related projects (he is currently porting Trident to JavaScript).
• Thorsten Klimpel let me know about a post by Illya Yalovyy, which talks about migrating an application to make use of the Better Swing Application Framework.
• René Jahn emailed me about JVx, an open source framework that appears to abstract away the underlying GUI toolkit, whilst also offering a number of conveniences.
• Alexander Pupeikis has posted an images filter demo application, which is apparently part of a new project he is working on. The source code is available, as is a Java Web Start link.

JavaFX

• Osvaldo Doederlein has an article discussing how he attempted to solve a DropBox coding challenge using JavaFX. In his usual style this is an interesting and informative read.
• Irina Filippova has a detailed article discussing how to create a simple database client using the JavaFX Composer.
• The SmartFaces project is starting to embrace JavaFX, with a SpellChecker component being the latest addition to the component suite that is written in JavaFX.
• Nick Apperley announced the release of JFX Blocks 0.3, which includes new controls, and more focus on media playback functionality.
• siesiek has a simple tutorial explaining how to use the JavaFX bind functionality to center nodes in a container or scene.
• The JavaFX Cookbook website has a brief tutorial on using the JavaFX reflection API. Note that reflection is slow, so use it sparingly, and only where absolutely necessary.

That’s that for another week. I hope you found a useful link or two. Catch you all again next week

Another quick post at a UI that annoyed me today, and today it is beta 2 of the Skype 5 client. Obviously, this is pre-release software, so perhaps it’ll be fixed by the final release. Anyway, the message I want to get across in this UI Oddities post is don’t make me scroll unnecessarily.

Refer to the image below. This is admittedly an image I found online of a slightly out-of-date client, but the point remains the same: the number of contacts on screen is considerable, given the size of the actual viewport. You can lessen the amount of scrolling even further by setting options inside Skype to hide contacts who are offline (which is my preference). Notice that, in this case, ‘Robert Miller’ is expanded as this contact has focus. That lets me see more details about that person, but in a normal workflow, this isn’t necessary and you’d have all contacts collapsed. Finally, note that the status messages that people sometimes use is to the right of the contacts name.

An older Skype client

I like this approach. My main requirement with Skype is to see which colleagues and friends are online, so that I can do my job. I have multiple monitors on my desk, and always have my Skype client visible on one of them. This makes it very easy to track who is online, and perform my job. In other words, the Skype 4 (and less) UI was great for me.

Compare the first screenshot to the second screenshot, which comes from my machine. In this case more emphasis is placed on the persons profile image, and therefore the amount of scrolling required is considerably more. In this case the status messages appear beneath the contacts name, rather than to the right, and space is reserved even if there is no status message. In the screenshot, there is only one status message (which is the dark red box). I’m sure this design is justified internally because the image is now bigger (even when the user doesn’t have an image defined), but in general I don’t like it because, as I said at the beginning, it requires me to scroll considerably more, and I can’t have my Skype window tall enough to see all online contacts at any one time.

As soon as I started up the new beta Skype client, I tried to dig through the options to try to change this. In my ideal situation, the image would be removed and the status message would return to it’s more logical location at the right of the contacts name. Alas, I failed to find anything in the options area, but I’m secretly hopeful that I just missed it, or that it’ll turn up in a future beta release.

For what it’s worth, my wish for an option to configure how the contacts looks isn’t without precedent. Windows Live Messenger has an options window, and one section of it contains the options shown in the screenshot below. In this case Windows Live Messenger lets me specify what both my favorites and my other contacts look like. Elsewhere in the options window I’ve set it that I don’t want to have favourite contacts. As shown in the screenshot below, all other contacts take the appearance of a small rectangle only (with the colour of the rectangle signifying the users status). This maximises the number of contacts I see onscreen, which is exactly what I need.

Windows Live Messenger contacts configuration options

I really hope to see a similar option in a future release of Skype 5, as the current approach is a huge nuisance for me. In general though, the message of this post is to other UI designers to consider your user, especially in cases where there is a potential for them to have a lot of data being presented, and where there may be some form of passive updating going on within the view. In these cases, there is considerably more value in presenting more data to the user at any one time over whitespace, which is unfortunately the direction Skype is currently going.

A very quiet week in the land of the Java Desktop, although thanks to the people who emailed me their links. I put this partly down to the JavaOne effect – everyone is off working on their talks and not blogging as much – the same thing happened last year. As always, feel free to email me with any comments or suggestions you may have.

On with the news!

Swing

• Wolfgang Zitzelsberger has part 3 of the series of posts on TableCellRenderers. This post focuses on delegate renderer examples.
• Rhiannon Liebowitz let me know that a new Swing component has been released for sale. It is a skinnable Calendar/Date Picker control.

JavaFX

• With the release of his new book, Vladimir Vivien has also posted a JavaFX Cookbook website with a number of useful tutorials.
• Mayboroda Dmitiry has two posts this week. His first post discusses improvements to my multiple selection hack for ListView. His second post discusses creating pseudo classes in JavaFX, and builds a TabPanel control to demo it (with source code). I’m not sure what it is with TabPanel / TabView controls – we all seem to be building them
• William Antônio showed off his HttpRequester application which is essentially a GUI frontend for the JavaFX HttpRequest class.

That’s it for another week. Thanks for coming along and I hope something in the links list was helpful to you. Catch you all in a weeks time

Another week has started, so it must be time for another batch of Java desktop links. As per usual there are some very good links this week, so enjoy

Swing

• Andres Almiray pointed me to AreaX, an optimised replacement for the java.awt.geom.Area class that appears to have some good performance improvements.

JavaFX

• Srikanth Shenoy has released FxContainer 1.0, which is an IoC container written in JavaFX, for JavaFX applications. You can learn more about FxContainer as a PDF (or an embedded PDF if you prefer).
• Exadel have released the 1.3.5 release of their free JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse. The two major features of this release are ‘setting VM parameters for JavaFX application’ and ‘option to specify custom JNLP arguments’.
• Osvaldo Doederlein has continued his deep dive series of posts, this time covering ‘JDK 6u21, JavaFX 1.3.1 and Deployment‘.
• In another post, Exadel have announced that Exadel Flamingo now supports CDI and Bean Validation for JavaFX.
• William Antônio has blogged about an application he created to retrieve images from various web services, and to manipulate them locally.
• Yücel Ünlü has blogged about using code optimization software to reduce the size of JavaFX applications.
• Henrik Samuelsson has created a JavaFX application for people wanting to improve their poker skills.
• Richa Singhal has provided a JavaFX Marquee effect. Use with caution (because no one likes marquees ).

That’s it for another week. Thanks to everyone for emailing links to include. I’ll catch you all again in a weeks time

A big week in the Java world, and I’m going to completely side-step the elephant in the room in todays post. This week there has been a great number of Java desktop posts, so I am very pleased to be presenting these links to you today. Enjoy!

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov has published the final releases of Trident 1.3, Flamingo 5.0, Substance 6.1 and the Substance Flamingo Plugin 6.1. People using older versions are encouraged to upgrade as these releases contain bug fixes and new features.
• Gerrit Grunwald has finally stopped teasing us with screenshots of his Swing gauge library, and has released them as a jar file to include in your applications. It appears that source code is not currently available, and the license is also unclear, so proceed with caution you can download the source code from the Kenai project site, where it is BSD licensed.
  
• Jacek Furmankiewicz has announced the 1.0 release of Swing JavaBuilder. Swing JavaBuilder is a library aiming to maximise the productivity of Java Swing developers via declarative UIs, MigLayout, DSL, databinding and built-in input validation.
• Kas Thomas has written about creating a “Smart Sobel” image filter.
• It seems like there is still life left in the Swing component market, with a new company entering the scene. Currently they offer Accordion, wrapping label and analog clock components.
• Michael Schnell wrote in to say that a new version of the webstart based installer “Kickstart4J” is available. Kickstart4J is a Java Webstart based installer and updater. You can find more information here.

JavaFX

• Eric Bruno has posted an article over at Dr Dobbs about building custom controls in JavaFX, in particular a ListView control that supports multiple selection. Remember that recently FX Experience also posted an example on how to create a multiple selection ListView.
• Martijn van de Rijdt has written about building a JavaFX project with Maven using javaFX 1.3 and the JFrog JavaFX Compiler Maven Plugin.
• itssmee has blogged about recreating Radioheads ‘House of Cards’ music video in JavaFX (the original video was created in Processing). For those unsure what is being referred to, check out this YouTube video.
• Sergey Malenkov has blogged about multi-threading in JavaFX, by recreating Reversi.
• Abhilshit Soni has posted ‘Yet another JavaFX App‘, which includes a runnable demo and source code.

Miscellaneous

• Josh Marinacci has announced his project Leonardo, which is “an open source vector drawing program for the 21st century. It focuses on common tasks like mockups, sketches, and presentations with a clean and consistent user interface. It is designed to be augmented by internet webservices and plugins created in several scripting languages.” Leonardo is written in Java, but does not use Swing or JavaFX, and as far as I can see, is just using custom components written by Josh.

That’s that for another week. I hope you all found something useful in the links today, and thanks to everyone for emailing their links to me. Catch you all in a weeks time

A very quiet week this week in terms of link quantity, but with new JavaFX and NetBeans releases it is made up for with some very important links to take note of this week. As always thanks to the people who take the time to email me their links.

Swing

• Kas Thomas has posted about implementing smart blur in Java.
• Jan Haderka has blogged that SwingX may be going to Maven. You can see further discussion of this over in the SwingX forum.
• Richard Kennard recently released Metawidget v0.99, and has written a 9 part blog series on the different ways he’s encountered that people like to order their UI fields. The general conclusion is that there is no ‘right’ way and a good UI generator must support multiple ways.

JavaFX

• JavaFX 1.3.1 was released this week. It contains a lot of improvements and bug fixes, and is accompanied by an updated NetBeans release. The main feature of JavaFX 1.3.1 is an improved (and more configurable) startup experience.
• Danny Coward presented at Jazoon in June with an interesting talk titled ‘Java SE and JavaFX: The Road Ahead‘. It’s a good and informative talk, so if you’ve got an hour to spare the video is well worth watching.
• David Kaspar has written an article over at the NetBeans knowledge base about using NetBeans JavaFX Composer fragments to make building user interfaces easier (by spanning them over multiple files).
• I posted two screencasts for two controls I built in my spare time: TitledPane and Accordion.

Todays UI oddity is small, but important, and it’s something that has irked me ever since I started using NetBeans (when I joined the JavaFX team last year). Despite me picking on NetBeans here, this problem is common in many applications, and largely goes ignored or unnoticed by developers. I wanted to point it out as it is a very easy UI crime to commit, and one that can sometimes take a lot of effort to fix. Fortunately, in the cases below it would be trivial to fix.

In NetBeans you often get dialog windows like the one shown below. The problem is simply that the header area has a 1 pixel wide gray border around all four edges. This looks nice to delineate between the white of the header and the light gray of the main content area, but it looks really bad on the north, east and west sides of the header. Fortunately this is easily fixed.

To back up my point, look at the screenshot below, which is again NetBeans, but a different dialog without the additional border on the north, east and west sides of the header. In my opinion it looks considerably cleaner:

The only negative aspect is that the two border colours differ between the top dialog and the bottom dialog, but this again is an easy fix and just a matter of defining the default colour for header borders.

Finally, I wanted to point out another common example of bad borders, and was fortunate enough to find the following screen in my NetBeans install:

This screenshot nicely shows the problem of nested borders. Look at the centre ‘Expanded Text’ tab. Inside this tabbed area is a rich text editor with its own border, but it is also wrapped within the border of the tabbed area. This looks untidy and cluttered. It’s also worth nothing that the space between the inner and outer borders differs on each side. In my opinion the inner border (the rich text editor border) should be removed in this circumstance. It would lead to a visually less cluttered and cleaner dialog in a small way.

So, in summary, be careful of borders in your software. It’s very easy to put components together and not really notice that borders are being duplicated like this. Finally, even though this is a NetBeans UI Oddity, it’s very common all across the software world, so I’m not picking on NetBeans here

Fortunately, this is an easy fix in this specific case.

Howdy folks. This week there wasn’t a lot of news in the Java desktop world, especially to do with Swing. There were a number of good JavaFX posts, which I’ve included here, and also a Apache Pivot discussion. Enjoy!

JavaFX

• Srikanth Shenoy has released FxObjects 0.1. FxObjects is a open source Enterprise JavaFX Application Development framework. The whole intention of the framework is to make Enterprise JavaFX application development easy, elegant and fast. There is a quick summary, and also a 50-page user guide PDF.
• Stuart Marks has blogged about ‘Missing Listeners and Local Overrides‘ in the JavaFX UI controls.
• Speaking of control listeners, Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged his event handling proposal.
• Patrick Champion has blogged about a RESTful client in JavaFX.
• One of the new features in the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse is support for ‘Organize Imports‘.
• Mark Anro Silva posted his JavaFX animation demo.
• I posted two screencasts related to my personal SplitView project. At this point it’s a very early proof of concept only.

Apache Pivot

• The Apache Software Foundation asks “Have you met Apache Pivot?“. There is also further discussion over at DZone.

That’s all for this week – I told you it was a quick post. Catch you in a weeks time.

Another week, another bunch of good links right across the Java desktop ecosystem. Let’s dive right into the links of the week!

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov has posted release candidates of Trident, Flamingo and Substance. The final releases for all the projects are scheduled for August 9. Only bugs will be fixed until that date.
• Gerrit Grunwald has posted about painting conical gradients in Java2D.

JavaFX

• I posted an example of how to create a ListView in JavaFX that supports multiple selection over at FX Experience.
• dooApp posted an introduction to their FXForm project. FXForm is a library providing automatic form generation for JavaFX objects.
• Carl Dea has published a JavaFX Tabbed Pane and Tab Panel prototype.
• Sébastien Stormacq has posted about creating an animated chart in JavaFX.
• Srikanth Shenoy continues with the third part of his series titled ‘Effective JavaFX Architecture’. This week his post looks at ‘Asynchronous calls, Command Pattern and Testability‘.
• As part of his series of posts, Srikanth has also been creating a JavaFX project called fxobjects. From the website, “FxObjects is a JavaFX Application Framework that enables methodical, pattern based and test friendly way of developing JavaFX applications based on ideas and best practices distilled from real life usage”.
• Due to the amount of echoing going on about JavaFX and it’s future, most of which consist of references to each other (with very little further information), I’ve picked out Max Katz’s post this week as the only one I’m including. His post discusses what he believes the future of JavaFX looks like, both the good and the bad points.

Griffon

• Andres Almiray announced the release of Griffon 0.9.
• Andres Almiray was recently interviewed by DZone about Griffon 0.9, the road behind and the road ahead.
• The Griffon Guide 0.9 Reference Documentation has been posted, which is a work-in-progress.

So, in general, a week of impressive links, with some new releases, and interesting discussions and demonstrations. Keep it up folks, and I’ll catch you all again in a weeks time.

Well, what an interesting week we had in the JavaFX world. It started off with Kirill Grouchnikov posting his thoughts that JavaFX is a train wreck. This created a number of threads around the web discussing this. At the same time Stephen Chin posted his petition to open source JavaFX. So much controversy, so many (sometimes anonymous) comments – what a week! For what it’s worth, I’m just reporting the news here, not endorsing or disagreeing with any of it

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov has blogged about dynamic resizing of ribbon components in Flamingo 5.0. He also showed off the latest Mariner skin, which is included as part of Substance 6.1. Finally, he showed off the release information documentation for Flamingo 5.0.
• Karl Schaefer has blogged about PromptSupport, which is a new feature in SwingX 1.6.1. PromptSupport relates to showing prompt text in JTextFields to inform the user of what should be typed in.
• The PgsLookAndFeel is 1.1 Update 1 was released on 18th July. It fixes all known bugs.

JavaFX

• As mentioned, this week Kirill Grouchnikov outlined his thinking that JavaFX is a train wreck. Quite quickly the comments on his blog became incredibly side-tracked, so he turned off comments. Because of the nature of the topic, the discussion spilled over into a number of other blogs, and for the most part was mostly negative.
• Stephen Chin has posted a petition to open source JavaFX. Further discussion is available here and here.
• The next Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group topic has been announced: it’ll be Stephen Chin and Keith Combs doing a live lab session where they will demonstrate the concepts behind implementing JavaFX Controls. It’s coming up August 11, so a few weeks away yet.
• Jim Weaver has posted a tutorial on the Sun Developer Network titled “Stylin’ with JavaFX“.
• Dean Iverson has posted some comments about his previous blog posts to fix up mistakes and misunderstandings on his part.
• Max Katz has done a bunch of blogs recently, titled ‘Binding to server-side context variable from JavaFX‘, ‘Using Expression Language (EL) in JavaFX to communicate with server‘ and ‘Seam conversations from JavaFX‘.
• Alex Ruiz has announced FEST JavaFX Compiler Maven Plug-in 1.0b2. This release adds new configuration options.
• Sergey Malenkov has posted about ‘localized reaction time‘. It shows how you can localise your application in JavaFX.
• William Antônio Siqueira has created LyricSearchFX, which you can run over at his new blog.
• I posted two brief screencasts to show off a TabView control I’m building in my spare time.

Griffon

• Andres Almiray has posted another Griffon 0.9 sneak peek, this time looking at runtime enhancements.

Whew! What a week. Catch you all again in a week.