A03 is a third-party Swing look-and-feel developed by Davide Raccagni and available under BSD license. Today Davide has announced release 4.0 of A03, with the main emphasis on performance. One of the tools he used during the development cycle is the LightBeam testbed that aims to assist in performance analysis of look-and-feels, as well as rendering pipelines.

Here are the results for the different core and third-party look-and-feels, as measured on my machine (without hardware acceleration that makes some of the scenarios run by up to 40% faster) – lower numbers mean faster performance:

• 3039 Metal
• 3721 Windows
• 4004 Looks PlasticXP
• 4332 Nimbus
• 4665 Substance 5.1
• 4902 A03
• 4908 Synthetica Base

In addition to performance improvements, Davide has also worked with me over the last few weeks to provide support for Flamingo components. Not only does the A03 Flamingo plugin provide fine-tuned visuals to some of Flamingo’s components, it also allows A03-powered JRibbonFrames to host the application menu button, taskbar panel and contextual task groups on the title pane under decorated mode. In doing so, A03 has joined Substance in providing streamlined visuals for the interested applications.

Below you can find a few screenshots of JRibbon and JRibbonFrame under A03 – click to see the full-sized versions.

The first screenshot shows the default content of the test ribbon shipped with Flamingo:

The next screenshot shows the activated application menu button:

The next screenshot shows the rich popup panel associated with a command button:

The next screenshot shows the extended tooltip associated with a command button in the taskbar panel:

The last screenshot shows the contextual task group headers:

Davide – congratulations on the release, and thanks for providing feedback on the extensibility points of the core Flamingo UI delegates.