Sea Glass look and feel
October 1, 2009
I’ve teamed up with Kathryn Huxtable on a new look and feel for Java we’re calling “Sea Glass”. The look was inspired by the following image:
I’ve been working on the artwork, while Kathryn has been doing the hard part of converting the art into an actual Java look and feel. We’ve only just begun the project, so there is much yet to be done, but I’d like to share the following glimpses of the artwork with you:
The colors will likely be tweaked as we go, but the images above give you a feel for what we’re going for. I’ll provide a link for the project shortly, which will be open source.
If you have comments or suggestions, be sure to leave them below.
Exploding Pixels 
October 1, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Seems it will be a beauty Look and Feel.
October 1, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Do you have a problem with that? ;-)
February 23, 2013 at 5:36 am
hi how can i get this look and feel…
October 1, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Hi Ken,
Looks fantastic. Looks like you could end up surpassing Apple here (which could be a tad embarrassing). Keep up the good work.
Brendon.
October 1, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Thanks Brendon! We’re doing our best to make a top notch, professional look and feel.
-Ken
October 1, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Looks incredible promising!
October 1, 2009 at 10:02 pm
[…] Sea Glass look and feel « Exploding Pixels explodingpixels.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/sea-glass-look-and-feel – view page – cached I’ve teamed up with Kathryn Huxtable on a new look and feel for Java we’re calling “Sea Glass”. The look was inspired by the following image: I’ve been working on the artwork, while Kathryn… (Read more)I’ve teamed up with Kathryn Huxtable on a new look and feel for Java we’re calling “Sea Glass”. The look was inspired by the following image: I’ve been working on the artwork, while Kathryn has been doing the hard part of converting the art into an actual Java look and feel. We’ve only just begun the project, so there is much yet to be done, but I’d like to share the following glimpses of the artwork with you: The colors will likely be tweaked as we go, but the images above give you a feel for what we’re going for. I’ll provide a link for the project shortly, which will be open source. (Read less) — From the page […]
October 1, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Looking great! what’s it based on? Synth?
October 1, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Yes, it’s based on Synth. At the moment, we’re skinning Nimbus, which, it turns out, isn’t really set up to be skinned.
Actually, although Synth is a good base, if you want to change the *feel*, and not just the look, you’ll end up re-implementing a lot of Synth. I suspect we’ll end up just extending Basic.
But at the moment, we’re based on Synth.
-K
October 1, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Can’t wait to see it in action!
October 1, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Ohhh… Shiny!
What licence will it be released under? I would like to use this L&F in my app as a second choice other than Java L&Fs and QuAqua
October 1, 2009 at 11:30 pm
We’re using LGPL. -K
October 1, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Sorry. Forgot to ask this.
Could you use someone to help? I would love to contribute to this L&F!
October 2, 2009 at 12:50 am
Way sweet! Very very nice :-)
October 2, 2009 at 2:18 am
Well done !!! Looks really nice, keep up the good work. Can’t wait to get this laf for my swing apps.
October 2, 2009 at 6:55 am
Cool! Where i can download it????
October 2, 2009 at 10:38 am
It’s not available yet, but I’ll post here when it is (probably in the next couple of weeks).
October 2, 2009 at 8:53 am
A perfect combination of the new apple l&f with the old aqua l&f!
October 2, 2009 at 8:54 am
looks delicious, i like the conceptual focus on sea-eroded glass. can’t wait. any timescales?
October 2, 2009 at 10:39 am
Hi Andrew,
No time-table yet, but we should have something publicly available to try in the new couple of weeks.
October 2, 2009 at 9:43 am
Fabulous if you can create a Nimbus skin.
October 2, 2009 at 9:47 am
I love the depolished (?) look, a nice change from the all shiny interface trend.
Looks very nice, professional look, remaining sober. Excellent;
October 2, 2009 at 10:41 am
I wanted to create more visual interest than the plain a gradient (which are all the rage right now), but not be so gaudy as the “shiny” looks — hence, sea glass.
October 2, 2009 at 3:51 pm
And the name makes the song “Seagull”, by Steeleye Span (my favorite band) run through my head.
Bonus!
October 2, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Amazing! much better than any L&F i have seen. well done.
October 2, 2009 at 10:15 pm
I *LOVE* this L&F! Maybe I could make a GTK theme from this sometime.
October 3, 2009 at 9:29 am
We’ll be trying to make the title and toolbars consistent across platforms, which means we’ll look rather like a Macintosh. Think iTunes on Windows for the title and toolbar.
I rant more on this subject on this my website’s blog. Try
http://www.kathrynhuxtable.org/blog/category/computing .
October 3, 2009 at 9:39 am
this is soooo fantabulous!!. cant wait to have it for my applications.
October 3, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Wouhouuuu! That’s a great effort! I’m really looking forward to play with the first release!
From your slides, it looks like it could blend in well with Windows and Mac OS X, but I fear that depending on the used desktop and/or theme, it could look a bit too shiny when using Linux. I know, for now it’s just a concept, but I wonder whether you’re planning to provide some kind of color tweaking facility or a theme feature to allow for some minor adjustments.
Anyway, best wishes for your project. I will definitely track its progress. Thanks.
October 4, 2009 at 8:31 am
I suppose it depends on the desktop, but I run Gnome 2.26.1 on Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope) with my titlebar and desktop set to various green tones with the Human theme.
It looks fine.
In a couple of weeks when we feel comfortable enough to let people have a crack at it, we’ll see what you think.
October 4, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Hi Marco,
I’m not much of a Linux user, so I don’t have a good sense of what would look good on that platform — I’ll definitely spend some time looking at it though.
We will provide minor tweaks on each platforms for things like window chrome. In general, I try to avoid the ability to tweak things as I feel like it can be a cop-out for *really* thinking about the design. But your absolutely right that sometimes this is unavoidable.
Thanks for the feedback Marco.
-Ken
October 4, 2009 at 5:22 pm
See http://www.kathrynhuxtable.org/blog/2009/10/04/sea-glass-laffy-example-linux/ for a screen shot of Laffy with the Sea Glass L&F on Ubuntu Linux.
October 4, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Thanks, Ken. I absolutely second your opinion. If you can come up with something that blends in well across platforms out-of-the-box, this would be ideal! And I agree that it’s more important that the application looks and feels great, than to match the platform look. And that should be your focus, of course.
It’s just that there is sometimes a huge gap between platform appearance, and while Mac OS X and recent Windows versions both look “modern”, your typical Gnome desktop does not. Incidentally, I’m currently using a blueish Clearlooks theme on Ubuntu, but I can see me changing to a more dark appearance. A shiny blue app would contradict the overall theme here. Tolerable of course, but not ideal.
You might want to provide the option to honor the desktop colors in order to provide some kind of automatic adjustment. Just an idea.
Katryn, great to hear that you are already testing on Gnome. I don’t know how many users can stand the default appearance when using Ubuntu, your theme is obviously customized and might therefore not be representative. Not that I know which theme is most widely used. The diversity in the Linux world should be way higher than on other platform. That’s why I think a color adaption could be beneficial.
Anyway, thanks for both of your for a brace effort!
October 4, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Marco, your comments make sense to me.
I’m using Human, which is the default look for Ubuntu, with the desktop and title set to green tones.
I’ve used Clearlooks. In fact, I’ve tried just about everything before Gnome finally made Human have customizable colors instead of Elephant Dung Orange.
At the moment, we’re using actual PNG images to get us up and running more quickly and to do quick prototyping. We could, I suppose, dynamically change the color balance of the images, but I’m not sure that’s the way we’d want to go.
In the long run, I expect us to use Graphics2D operations to create the controls.
October 4, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Thanks for the screenshot. The overall appearance looks nice.
I don’t like the colored window control buttons, that’s one reason why I prefer the toned down Graphite theme on Mac OS X. Theming here we are again ;)
BTW, currently the L&F seems to be image based. Is it already decided to stick with that? I already mentioned Substance on your blog as a possible basis for a custom implementation. What about that? Thanks.
October 4, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Marco, we probably won’t stick with images. They’re just a way of getting up and running quickly.
I haven’t ever tried to do anything with Substance, but I don’t like any of its existing skins in the demo. So there’s a visceral thing going on here. Maybe it’s the strong borders on controls, but it looks a bit clunky to me.
Sort of like Linux. ;-)
October 4, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Kathryn, your are too fast for me ;) Unfortunately threading seems to be limited and the posts got a bit messed up. Oh well.
Adjusting colors should be no big deal when using Graphics2D. That’s what I had hoped for :)
AFAIK, Java provides support for getting the platform colors, but I don’t know how reliable that is. Once I have something to play with, I might investigate here.
October 4, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Kathryn, regarding Substance, I don’t like its appearance either. Obviously the developer is not so much a designer than a programmer, plus he only uses Windows (no offense, Kirill, I really like your outstanding work!), but it’s a complete and technically sound, Graphics2D based implementation that might really save you a lot of work or at least give you inspiration. I don’t have a link at hand, but I remember some blog posts outlining insane care to get the painting details right.
Maybe you could even team up and bring Substance to a whole new level. I know, sounds less thrilling than a new project, but I believe the developer knows an awful lot about implementing Look&Feels and all things Java graphics, that this could really be beneficial to all parties interested ;)
October 4, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Marco, I think Ken has threading limited to three levels on his WordPress blog. I set it to five on mine, but whatever you do it’s a fixed limit on WordPress.
Obviously, Kirill has done a lot with L&F. You make good points.
We’ll think on this.
October 4, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I did a quick peek on his blog and came over this entry where he talks about some challenges and improvements:
http://www.pushing-pixels.org/?p=1065
There is more if you search for “resolution” or “dpi”. AFAIK, he gave a presentation with Mike Swingler at JavaOne last year on this very topic.
October 5, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Marco, I think I prefer my pixels to be exploding rather than pushed. ;-)
October 6, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Kathryn, duly noted ;)
It will be interesting to compare the different implementations. Substance shows a long history of constant improvements, and it seems technically mature.
Just like Kirill, you can be only applauded for your work and I’m really looking forward to play with the results
October 4, 2009 at 4:41 am
[…] Orr posted that he and Kathryn Huxtable are working on a new (and very good looking) look and feel for Swing called Sea Glass. A day later, Kathryn posted a bit more information about their […]
October 4, 2009 at 11:39 am
Looks nice. Somehow it makes me remind of how Mac OS X looks, not sure why that is though. But once again, it looks nice! Good luck with the project :)
October 4, 2009 at 2:51 pm
[…] It that mocks Mac-kind look inspired by different colored stones. You can checkout the details here. Info Look And Feel This one is based on the Metal look and feel. This is the one that you will […]
October 4, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Very very nice!
October 4, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Absolutely amazing style! This might turn out to look better than Aqua!
October 4, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Before I get too exited about this, what Java version will be required? I really hope you stick with 5.0, yes?
October 4, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Well, at the moment, we’re going with 6.0, because we’re extending Nimbus. I don’t think we’ll continue with Nimbus, though, because it has too many default scoped packages and it’s actually more difficult to extend than I think Jasper and Richard thought it would be.
If we drop Nimbus, I see no reason we couldn’t drop back to 5.0.
October 4, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Thanks, that’s what I feared. Substance requires Java 6.0 as well. Totally understandable for a FOSS project without any revenue, but it limits the usefulness in certain areas. I have customers who are still on 1.4…
October 4, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Well, I’m not willing to fall back to before 5.0 because I’m not willing to give up generics, for/each, and enum. Especially generics, though for/each is a big deal to me.
1.4.2 was the workhorse for a long time, but its time has passed.
October 4, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Sure, 1.4 is no option. I’m specifically interested in 5.0 support
October 4, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Congratulations, looks great!
Are you planning to have a generic API so that one could easily extend their custom controls to use your look and feel?
October 4, 2009 at 11:44 pm
We haven’t thought much about that aspect yet. We know we want to support client properties a la Aqua to customize appearances, but we haven’t thought a lot beyond that.
We’ll definitely be supporting segmented buttons and search textfield, because I want them and so does Ken.
October 5, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Wow, looks awesome! Does it have to be LGPL though? Unfortunately many companies can’t use LGPL libraries due to the “reverse engineering” clause. If the license has not yet been finalized, it would be great if you considering dual licensing it under MPL as well. It’s basically the same as LGPL, but keeps the lawyers happier :)
October 5, 2009 at 8:13 pm
How would you feel about the Apache 2.0 license? That tends to be my default license, but since Ken already had MacWidgets licensed under LGPL and I figured we’d use some of the code, and we are, I figured I’d stick with LGPL.
October 5, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I’m flexible — a looser license is fine with me.
October 6, 2009 at 1:09 am
Yeah, Apache license (or BSD or MIT or MPL) would be fine. LGPL is the only problematic one I know of, because most developers consider it commercial-friendly, while many company lawyers do not.
October 6, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Okay, Ken and I have decided to switch to Apache2. I will make the appropriate changes in the source and licensing files.
October 12, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Great, thanks :)
October 5, 2009 at 8:19 pm
I should also add that most of those companies’ lawyers are not correct. LGPL’s reverse engineering clause generally isn’t an issue for a library such as a Look and Feel.
We’ll eventually have mechanisms to allow you to add it to your custom controls without reverse engineering it. It’ll either be a derived class, which need not be LGPL’d according to the LGPL or an API call.
October 5, 2009 at 5:52 pm
[…] Sea Glass […]
October 6, 2009 at 12:25 am
nice…. I really can’t wait to use this L&F…
great job for both of you…
October 6, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Looks lovely!
October 7, 2009 at 1:08 am
Are we there yet? :)
Looks very nice.
October 7, 2009 at 9:52 am
Not even close. We have buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, and scroll bars done. Ken says he’ll get spinner designs to me shortly.
I’m engaged in refactoring my original code, which was too closely based on Nimbus to be extended, especially if we want to support client properties, and we do.
I’ve made some good progress on the first step of three towards where we want to be. Once that’s done, my work will be simpler. Ken’s won’t, though.
Once the refactoring is done I won’t be embarrassed to show the code, and we’ll release our Laffy test, even if it still uses Nimbus controls for the stuff we haven’t yet done. Which is which will be obvious, because the colors and styles are different.
October 7, 2009 at 9:53 am
Forgot. We also have combo boxes done. They look nice.
October 7, 2009 at 9:54 am
Wow! I just noticed that Ken’s site runs on GMT. I’m on GMT-5 (for DST) and it’s 4:54 AM here.
October 12, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Hi Ken, Kathryn,
this looks very promising and I have the feeling that this L&F might come in very handy for my own project, which relies heavily on MacWidgets. Problem there is, that you end up having a great looking app on Mac but making it look equally nice on Windows become a very difficult task. I started using Nimbus for this and made good progress on it, but had to struggle with these things, which I hope your L&F will cover for me:
– A unified titlebar and toolbar
– Window decorations (Nimbus does not have them for JFrame and JDialog, only for internal frames and dialogs) … this of course overlaps with the first item on this list
– Segmented buttons (ideally using the same client properties that Apple is using)
– A search field (once again … like Apple)
– A table with optional alternating row colors that actually fills the viewport all the way to the bottom (I know Ken knows how to do that)
– A table header that fills the god-damn upper right corner
– A table header that knows how to render icons out of the box (come on Apple, come on Sun/Nimbus)
– Rounded window corners using transparency
This is it, my wishlist for Christmas …. speaking of timeframes …. :-)
Dirk
P.S.: I volunteer for beta testing!
October 12, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Hi Dirk,
We’ll definitely have the unified title/toolbar for all OSs.
We’ll definitely have segmented buttons and we’ll have some sort of variant that will look good in the toolbar.
I want a search field, so we’ll have it.
Yes, we’ll be able to fill the viewport with the alternating rows, and of course we’ll fill the upper right corner.
Hmmm…. I guess I hadn’t thought about rendering icons in the header, but why not?
Rounded window corners with transparency is very problematic on Mac OS X due to the window resizing bug. But I think we can do it on Windows/Linux.
October 12, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Oops, just red Kathryns comment on segmented buttons and search fields. Check, check ….
Dirk
October 12, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Hi Dirk,
We plan to address pretty much everything you referenced, including nice looking window chrome on Windows which supports the concept of a unified toolbar.
Stay tuned for more blog updates about our progress.
-Ken
October 13, 2009 at 7:26 am
May I have this yesterday, please? :)
Beautiful. Hurry up! :)
October 13, 2009 at 2:41 pm
One more thing: please make sure that the components can be laid out consistently. Meaning, don’t make the mistake Apple made where some text components have the blurry blue focus border and others don’t. Block aligning a textarea and a textfield on a Mac is almost impossible.
Dirk
October 13, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Anything else? ;-)
You folks do understand that our first cut of this will be very rough and will be to whet your appetites. Right?
October 13, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I have an example of a table from Laffy rendered in Sea Glass at:
http://www.kathrynhuxtable.org/blog/2009/10/13/another-sea-glass-example-tables/
I’m interested in comments on it, in particular the rendering of the striping around the checkboxes.
October 21, 2009 at 10:45 pm
[…] Ken’s site for more information. Comment (RSS) […]
October 22, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Hey look beautiful.
One thing, be careful with focus, i see many look and fells with focus treatment is poor, many user of my apps, hate using mouse then focus it’s very important.
GOOD LUCK
October 24, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I’m not a big fan of the mouse myself, except for graphics programs, so don’t worry too much.
October 25, 2009 at 9:58 pm
[…] Sea Glass look and feel […]
October 28, 2009 at 2:49 pm
A quick update.
We’re working on non-Mac title panes. Because of the Mac programmatic resizing bug, we’ll use Mac title bars on a Mac. Otherwise the window shudders when you resize.
For everything else, we’ll look a bit like iTunes in that we’ll put the menu bar in the title pane.
Ken has designed some nice Chrome-ish iconify/maximize/close buttons.
I’m wondering if we want to use the close button a la Mac to indicate that the document has changed. On a Mac, the close button gets a dark dot in the middle which shows even when you mouse over instead of the “x”.
I had also thought of putting something in the title itself, but since applications frequently have structure in the title, that’s problematic.
I suppose (this just occurred to me) that we could put an indicator to the left of the iconify button…
Ideas?
October 29, 2009 at 3:18 pm
So looks nice enough but what is the point of this new LAF. Every single Mac user I’ve come across has wanted Java apps to act as a native app and I try to keep quiet about my app being Java – so I hope work is still continuing on MacWidgets,
This new LAF isn’t going to help on Macs, and I’m not sure Windows users would want their application to look less Windows like.
Am I missing the point of this …
October 29, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I disagree — I’m an avid Mac user and don’t mind when things are different so long as they are at least as good if not better than the platform look. Case in point:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/
It doesn’t look like any Mac app I’ve seen, but that doesn’t bother me at all.
October 29, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Maybe , but your example is NOT a Java application. As soon as your average Mac user finds out an application is written in Java they are looking to find differences with the way it works to ‘Native’ Apps.
October 29, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Gee, Apple changed their own look and feel with the iTunes app. It doesn’t look like a Mac app.
I think there’s room for both.
October 29, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I should add that Windows is all over the map, and iTunes has been pretty well accepted on Windows.
October 30, 2009 at 8:05 am
But the difference is that iTunes is made by Apple, so it is accepted and becomes the ‘standard’
October 29, 2009 at 9:47 pm
And of course, you could always use native controls since Mac OS X has Cocoa APIs available for Java these days.
November 7, 2009 at 3:52 pm
[…] time has passed since Ken Orr has announced that he has teamed up with Kathryn Huxtable to work on a new Sea Glass look-and-feel for Swing […]
November 8, 2009 at 9:14 pm
[…] to pay attention to. Finally, Kirill wrote a Sea Glass skin for Substance, based on the details outlined by Ken Orr and Kathryn […]
November 14, 2009 at 5:41 pm
??? How to install SEa Glass.?
IDe: eclipse
os:ubuntu
November 23, 2009 at 8:52 pm
[…] had a whole lot of time recently, but I’ve updated the color palette (see the original colors back here) and drawn some new artwork for the Sea Glass look and feel. Kathryn has been plugging away on the […]
January 19, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Beautiful. Eager to use them on a project.
July 2, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Excellent … Keep up the good work.
October 23, 2010 at 2:31 am
[…] O as cores suave do Sea Glass: […]
November 30, 2010 at 5:15 pm
I cant find the download link… :-S
November 30, 2010 at 6:02 pm
You can download it via Maven. See Kathryn’s blog for details:
http://www.kathrynhuxtable.org/blog/2010/02/16/sea-glass-now-on-maven-central-repository/
January 11, 2011 at 4:59 am
[…] Sea Glass This is relatively anew theme under development. This one is among the best I’ve seen around. It that mocks Mac-kind look inspired by different colored stones. You can checkout the details here. […]
February 23, 2011 at 8:03 pm
Absolutely amazing!!! Keep up with the good work ;)
March 9, 2011 at 4:45 am
sea glass is very beautyful. please send me class code for developing my third year project.pls………
March 9, 2011 at 4:00 pm
The project is open source. You can get the code here:
http://code.google.com/p/seaglass/
March 30, 2011 at 9:38 am
is this finished yet? I want to try it out on some of my apps
April 15, 2011 at 6:45 am
nice theme, thanks,I will try
July 3, 2011 at 6:08 am
@ ken simply outstanding job.
November 12, 2011 at 8:45 pm
Great work i m going to use it… thank u so much
January 20, 2012 at 7:00 pm
hey can u plz tell me, once downloaded how can i apply this look and feel to my java application??
March 23, 2012 at 5:42 am
great….
i want also look and feel like in windows 7…..
April 4, 2012 at 4:43 pm
Hey port it to JavaFX2 :)
May 3, 2012 at 5:50 pm
its butiful
July 21, 2012 at 1:56 am
This is an awesome look n feel, hope that, inshallah ! it will bring good marks in my project !!!! :D :D :D
November 1, 2012 at 3:53 pm
Thank you! I’m looking for this :)
March 9, 2014 at 4:34 am
So… where’s the download?
March 12, 2014 at 3:10 pm
where can i download and try it?
September 17, 2014 at 11:55 am
Is it ready? Or left in the middle of development?