This is the third part of the series on new visuals for the JRibbon component under Substance look-and-feel, and it’s time to talk about one of my favorite features in Substance – animations. Those of you familiar with the Office 2007 might have noticed that while the in-ribbon galleries provide nice scrolling animations, other parts of the ribbon are not animated. Specifically, i’m talking about rollover effects on the ribbon buttons and tabs – the transitions between the default (flat) and the rollover (active) states are immediate.

Here is a small video that shows the JRibbon rollover transitions under the normal animation speed settings. The skin is the new Creme Coffee:

And here is a video of the same rollover transitions under the Office Blue 2007 skin:
Want to take it for a spin? You’ll need the latest binaries of Substance, Flamingo and Substance Flamingo plugin.

In the first part, i showed a few screenshots of the new look of the JRibbon component under Substance look-and-feel. Continuing the series, today i’m going to show an additional new feature that allows creating less intrusive UIs with the JRibbon.

Substance already has a client property that you can install on a specific component or globally on the UIManager. When the USE_THEMED_DEFAULT_ICONS property is set to Boolean.TRUE, the button icons of buttons in default state (not rolled over, not selected, not pressed) are colorized with the colors of the current theme. This works especially well under low-contrast skins such as Raven Graphite or Autumn, and now it is also supported on the JRibbon button components.

Here is a screenshot of the JRibbon component under the Raven Graphite skin when the USE_THEMED_DEFAULT_ICONS client property is not specified. As you can see, the icons are fully colored, which results in a slightly intrusive UI:

Here is the same UI when this property is set:

And here is the same UI when the mouse is hovering over the “Paste” button:

Here is the original full-color UI under the Autumn skin:

And the same UI with the property set:

And the same UI with the mouse hovering over the “Computer” icon:

Here is the original full-color UI under the Creme skin:

And the same UI with the property set:

And the same UI with the mouse hovering over the “Computer” icon:

Want to take it for a spin? You’ll need the latest binaries of Substance, Flamingo and Substance Flamingo plugin.

It’s been more than two years since i first started working on all-Java version of the Office 2007 ribbon component (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). Since then, there have been quite a few visual improvements in the Substance look-and-feel, and it’s time to apply these to the Substance Flamingo plugin. This series will walk through the major UI changes to the JRibbon component that is now much better aligned with the look of core and SwingX components under Substance.

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Office Silver 2007 skin:

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Office Blue 2007 skin:

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Creme skin:

Here is how JRibbon looks under the Business skin:

And here is how JRibbon looks under the Autumn skin:

Want to take it for a spin? You’ll need the latest binaries of Substance, Flamingo and Substance Flamingo plugin.

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

• A three-part series by Eric Burke on do’s and do not’s of scroll panes. Read part 1, part 2 and part 3. A good rule of thumb would be to never use scroll panes for wrapping UI controls. Only use them for wrapping text areas, trees, lists and tables.
• The first public tutorial on using AnimatedTransitions library by Nazmul Idris. Promised at this year’s JavaOne and covered in Filthy Rich Clients, this library is yet to see the light of the day (and hence the tutorial is a little unexpected). I’ve written on the subject of UI transitions before, questioning the usefulness of this technique; it still appears that this field draws a few “that’s interesting” but doesn’t go much farther than that. An interesting paper can be found in the Phosphor research project that puts some hard numbers on transitions usability.
• Want to use Swing look-and-feels in Groovy 1.1 applications? Danno Ferrin shows you how.
• SwingWorker gets some internal facelift in the latest Dolphin binaries, switching the thread pool implementation to the standard java.util.concurrent classes.
• Matt Nathan has a first draft of the tutorial on JXComponent and XComponentUI classes. Combined with Jan Haderka‘s announcement on release 0.9 of SwingX (which coincided with the downtime for swinglabs.org), it shows that there is still some life in SwingX. Unfortunately, it still lacks well-defined release schedule and strong commitment from Sun to the development lifecycle and overall direction of the project.