Comments on: Button click masks

By: Don

Don — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:03:47 +0000

Ken,

Thanks, the engine reads the sdf files and creates the visuals defined in the files. In the specific case of the scrollbars, there is a custom UI class for the scrollbars. Line #6 of application.sdf tells the engine to use that ui for all scrollbars. The source for that UI is part of the source bundle on the site.

Don

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:17:03 +0000

Hey Don, Interestingly enough, I was just reading Kirill's interview with you this morning and gave your iTunes clone demo a try. How does the Java2D painting code tie in with your sdf files? I don't see any Java source here. Neat work by the way! -Ken

By: Don

Don — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:28:23 +0000

Hey Ken,

I came across this article and I thought it interesting.
I actually have implemented the specific look to mimic the iTunes scroll bars on windows just using Java2D. It is part of an iTunes clone demo. You can see it this week on Pushing Pixels.

Don

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:43:25 +0000

Note that there was a bug in the original code I posted, which I’ve fixed in the blog entry above. CustomButtonUI.paintIcon was saving a refernece to the iconRect variable rather than creating a new rectangle from the values iconRect contained.

This was problematic as the iconRect variable was statically defined in ButtonUI and reused to layout each button. Thus fIconRect would always have the icon bounds for the last painted button.

By: Pavan kumar

Pavan kumar — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:35:21 +0000

Hi Ken,

The vector images are produced using Adobe Illustrator.

-Pavan

By: Swing links of the week: October 12 : Pushing Pixels

Swing links of the week: October 12 : Pushing Pixels — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:07:12 +0000

[...] Orr writes about image-based method to create non-rectangular active (clickable) areas for Swing buttons. While this [...]

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:39:01 +0000

Hi Pavan,

If your drawing the vector based art into a BufferedImage before sending it to the screen, then no changes would be needed.

How are you producing your vector art?

-Ken

By: Pavan kumar

Pavan kumar — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 07:30:49 +0000

What changes would be needed if the images were vector based instead.

By: Ken

Ken — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:27:18 +0000

Thanks for the tip Eric. I’ve updated the code accordingly.

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:17:05 +0000

You don’t want to call setUI from the constructor. Instead, you should override the updateUI method and set your custom UI delegate from that method. We made this mistake on many of our custom components and found some subtle bugs later on because of it. For example, if anyone ever calls SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI, updateUI will be called again. If you only set your UI in the constructor, the UI will revert back to the one defined by Swing. Furthermore, we’ve seen cases where Windows users, for example, can start a remote desktop connection to their PC, and updateUI may be called. It’s also called when you do things like change the Windows theme from XP to Classic while your app is running. These factors are outside the control of your application code, so even if you never use the SwingUtilities method, the updateUI method may be called.

Search for the “How to Write a Custom Swing Component” article by Kirill Grouchnikov, this shows the correct way to plug in custom UI delegates.