David Qiao's Blog

In the 2.6.6 release, we introduced a small cool component called MarqueePane to JIDE Common Layer. It is open source so please fee free to give it a try. You can use it to auto-scroll any component. It is perfect for use cases such as an auto-scrolling stock tick display or an auto-fliping status, You can run webstart demo to see MarqueePane in action.

Apple just released a new JDK6 on Mac. It is suppose to be a good news but it turned out to be a nightmare. They changed the package structure of Aqua L&F. Many classes that were under apple.laf package are now under com.apple.laf. This breaks pretty much everything we tried to make JIDE looking decent enough on Mac. Even more, I could change our code to use the new classes but how to make it compatible with both old and new JDK? Two sets of JIDE clasess or even two release packages? It is really werid to see Apple did such a strange thing in a minor JDK update (maybe make sense for JDK 7). Hope someone from Apple Java team can give me an explantion.

I got a technical session for JavaOne 2009 to talk about JTables. I knew JTables and JIDE Grids are used very widely among JIDE customers. So I am very eager to collect some screenshots from real applications to show what tables look like in the real world. It doesn’t have to be JIDE Grids. It could be a JTable with customization or JXTable or your own table component. I will dedicate a few minutes from the session to show those screenshots to the audience. I will of course give the credit to you. If you are interested, please email me david at jidesoft.com. I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Just so you know, we release a new icon set for Mac OS X. We are also running a promotion to sell all three icon sets (XP, Vista and Mac) at only $300, which is a very good deal. It is a good chance if you want to own your own icon sets.

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 button focus. So I decide to add this feature. it has about 200 lines simple code. I included it below. The javadoc tells you how to use it. It is already checked in to JIDE Common Layer so feel free to check it out and use it. JIDE’s ButtonPanel called it already. JideOptionPane, since it uses ButtonPanel, also works beautifully.

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 with Synthetica 2.7.2/SyntheticaAddons 0.9.7.

• Black Moon Theme
• Black Start Theme
• Blue Ice Theme
• Blue Moon Theme
• Blue Steel Theme
• Green Dream Theme
• Mauve Mmetalic Theme
• Orange Mmetalic Theme
• Silver Moon Theme
• Sky Metal Theme
• White Vision Theme
• Standard Theme

Wolfgang, thanks for the support. The Synthetica L&F looks awesome.

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.

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 Managed UI, OS-guideline driven Application UI, built-in MVC and FileFormat etc. It also provides easy integration with JIDE Docking/Action Framework and DocumentPane. I encourage to check out the JDAF product page or the self-guided JDAF tutorial to learn more about JDAF and find out how it can make your application development easier.

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 icon is a very important part to any user interface. You can’t just ignore it. So after several months of hardwork, we finally release our first stock icon set with 141 professionally designed icons. This icon set is built by our graphic designer along with our developers for JIDE component products. By combining both the artistic talent and the logical thinking talent together, this icon set is designed with developer in mind which makes it extremely easy to use in any software applications, especially for Java/Swing applications which all our existing JIDE customers and users are building. It even comes with a jar file that you can put into your class path and start to use those beautiful icons right away. Anyway, you can find more information about the developer oriented features over here. Even though it is not free, the price for this icon set is at a very affordable $149.99 for the Java version which is roughly $1 per icon. At the same time, we also introduced custom icon design services to meet your need. If you dream to have a consistent user interface with a set of unique icons across all applications in your company, we are right here to help you.

Here are a few links related to this icon set.

• Icon Service Overview: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/index.html
• Icon Preview: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/preview.htm
• Custom Icon Design: http://www.jidesoft.com/icon/design.htm
• Icon Set Purchase: http://www.jidesoft.com/store/index.php?cPath=33

Hope you will like those icons. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know.