I’m always excited to see an announcement of a new look and feel (or even a new skin in an existing look and feel). Writing such a library is quite a complicated task that requires a lot of resources and perseverance. And so, it is my great pleasure to see two new third-party look and feels announced in the last couple of days.

The first is A03 and comes from Davide Raccagni. Very nice and polished visuals, a lot of smooth animations and transitions, and even the initial theming support. It has a few interesting ideas that i would like to incorporate into future versions of Substance, such as “flowing” menus and extended file chooser. The license is very permissive (BSD), and the only thing that might hinder its acceptance is the minimum JDK requirement – JDK 6.0.

The second is Titanium and comes from Teppefall Labs. It extends one of the dark skins from Substance and provides a modern-looking, clean and consistent skin for desktop applications. My original intent was to make Substance as extensible as possible, and this is the first time i am aware of a third-party look and feel that extends it. Hopefully, most of the extension hooks are already in place, and if not, they will be.