David Qiao’s Blog

There is one missing feature in ButtonPanel. That’s the arrow key support. On Windows (probably on Mac as well), people get used to use left or right keys to navigate among buttons on a horizontal button panel or up/down keys for vertical button panel. However Swing doesn’t have that. For example, in the JOptionPane, arrow keys don’t change [...]

I had been working closely with Wolfgang in last couple of months or so trying to support Synthetica L&F in all JIDE product lines. I am glad to say we are finally there. You can find some nice screenshots of our demos under various Synthetica themes below. They are all taken under JIDE 2.2.8 release [...]

As I mentioned before, I had an interesting BOF session for the this year JavaOne. The title is “Workaround Swing Bugs”. Even though it was conflicted with the afterdark party, there was still a decent number of people showed up. Since several people asked for it, I post the slides and the demo source code below.
Slides for [...]

Kirill just posted an interview with me on his blog on Swing, RIA and JavaFX. It is a series of interviews with Amy Fowler, Mikael Grev and myself. I guess Kirill probably will have more interviews after the first three. Interesting discussions.

This is something Java/Swing community has been crying for years. We even received numerous requests to make such a component (and we declined all requests). That’s a lightweighted Swing component for html viewing (or editing). JDIC gave us some hope several years ago even though it is JNI based but that’s project went nowhere. There [...]

After nine month beta period, we finally release JIDE Desktop Application Framework officially. Comparing to other JIDE component products, JDAF is a whole different story. It is a ground-breaking platform for developing truly cross-platform desktop applications in Java and Swing. There are many concepts in JDAF that are the first of its kind, such as [...]

Here is the exciting news for all developers who hate being forced to design icons (I said it for myself :). As JIDE is focused on UI design area, we think it would be nice if we can create some icons for our customers who are Java/Swing developers. Developers are not good at designing icons but [...]

I don’t like Vista as it is apparently slower than XP. However I discovered something nice about it. Today, I was doing a build on Vista and I double clicked on Explorer table header to auto-fit a column, I noticed it didn’t fully expanded as I knew there is a long file name in this [...]

One user asked us to add a method to IconsFactory to rotate an icon for any angle. Sounds like a simple thing to do but it took me a while to get it right. It is checked in to JIDE Common Layer as part of 2.2.2 release. See below for the complete source. Feel free to [...]

I got an interesting BOF session for this year JavaOne. The topic is “Workaround Swing Bugs”. If you are Swing developers like me, you must feel frustrated by bugs in Swing. However, let’s look at it from the bright side. There are several components or features in JIDE are introduced because of Swing bugs. For example, [...]