My last entry on customer service has attracted a stray attention, and the main blog page was broken for a few hours today. Following this, i have deleted that entry along with the its comments – apologies to the readers. I have also deleted all registered users and disabled new user registration – apologies for the inconvenience. Comments on existing and future posts are left enabled for now.

The java.net site has just published my article on translucent and shaped windows, and it is one of the reasons why i have been a little quite on this blog. The two previous entries have shown simple usages of the shaped and translucent windows:

• The introduction to shaped and translucent windows
• Using soft clipping and per-pixel translucency

While this has a lot of potential, it is not immediately clear how it can be applied to the real-life Swing programs. The java.net article tries to explore this area a little bit further and touches on three examples:

• Translucent heavyweight tooltips
• Fading heavyweight tooltips
• Real time translucent reflection on a top-level window

The fading tooltip is my favorite at the moment. It shows the true potential of this functionality in providing a smooth user experience, especially in the context of modern UIs that use rollover and selection fades. The real time video reflection is also quite interesting, especially for the “coolness” factor.

The full sources can be found in the CVS repository of the companion PushingPixels java.net project.

If you have more ideas for window translucency, let me know in the comments.

Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• Thierry Lefort published an update to the lazy loading tree. It now includes a single expansion listener and better model / controller separation.
• Alex Ruiz will present a JavaOne session with Yvonne Price. It will talk about GUI testing and their FEST library.
• Jeff Friesen has an overview article about the AnimatingCardLayout project that provides animations on top of a usual core card layout. I have already blogged about the various approaches to the layout animation, and the last year hasn’t changed my opinion. These are nice to have, but almost never used. An important note on the specific project – it has been inactive since December 2004, so if you find a bug or want to file an enhancement, you’re on your own (the project license is BSD).
• Christopher Deckers announces release 0.9.4 of DJ Native Swing library. This brings improvement to stability and two new components, JVLCPlayer and JHTMLEditor.
• Christophe Le Besnerais writes about his experiments in colorizing Swing UIs. The code has an interesting twistin that it allows colorizing only some parts of the interface.
• Pavan Kumar explores a technique of showing progress without blocking the entire UI. Building on the previous work by Alexander Potochkin, it is a nice idea, but i found that the test application is not working as expected. While the table is indeed not blocked by the tree and shows that a selected cell is editable, i couldn’t type anything in until the tree was unblocked.
• Dave Cherry is working on wrapping the JFreeChart library in a Groovy builder. The code is being developed on top of the GroovyChart library.
• Andres Almiray has a busy Groovy week. He announced release 0.5 of his GraphicsBuilder library and also published the fourth part of the Groovy Zone tutorial.

Finally, quote of the week belongs to James Gosling:

Even though it’s a Java game, it’s only available for Windows and OS X – they use QuickTime for Java. (we’re trying to get our cross-platform media story together, but it’s tough… [codecs are easy, we’ve got piles of them: it’s all about patent royalties on free software :-( ])

Let’s compare this with QT Jambi:

Qt and Qt Jambi 4.4 gets full-blown multimedia support through the Phonon framework adopted from KDE. This gives easy access to playing and manipulating movies and music in all the nice file formats for which the underlying media framework has codecs. The framework defaults to using Gstreamer (Linux), Microsoft DirectShow (Windows) and Quicktime (Mac OS X).

So, another cross-platform UI toolkit is showing that it can be done and that it will be officially released this year…

Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:

• Thierry Lefort kicks off the week with an implementation of lazy loading tree. It handles quite a few scenarios with a very simple approach, but the code overhead could be a little better (having only one SwingWorker and one listener would be welcome, especially for large trees that warrant such a functionality).
• Albireo is a new Eclipse incubation project. It aims to simplify the task of combining Swing and SWT components, and at first stage focuses on allowing seamless embedding of Swing component in SWT applications (as opposed to the DJ project that allows integrating native components in Swing applications). The project is lead by Gordon Hirsch and Bruno Haible, and you can follow all the intricacies of bridging the two UI toolkits at the mailing lists. If you want to learn more about this project, come to session 211 and session 549 at EclipseCon (March 17-20 at Santa Clara).
• On a related subject, QT Jambi AWT bridge allows integrating AWT / Swing and QWidget components (both ways). Eskil Blomfeldt has announced the availability of Windows pre-built binaries.
• David Qiao of JIDE blogs about bringing a piece of Vista functionality into the JIDE tables. I have done a similar thing about a year ago, bringing two Vista features to Swing trees (part 1 and part 2).
• And finally, Thierry Lefort wraps up the week with the discussion of reusing the same filter on multiple JXTable components from SwingX component suite.