VistaLookAndFeel, Office2007LookAndFeel?

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VistaLookAndFeel, Office2007LookAndFeel?

Postby gigantatron » Sat Mar 17, 2007 6:18 am

Are you working on LAFs for either of the above? If so, do you have ETCs?

More generally, I would like the Jide LAFs to support partial transparency and snazzier animations/transitions, as found in Flex applications and Vista.

Currently my company are considering whether to go with Flex or Swing+JIDE for UI development, and I would dearly love them to choose the latter. Whilst the overall JIDE experience is light years ahead of most Swing apps, I think my company consider the look slightly old fashioned in comparison to Flex, mostly due to the lack of transparency and transition effects.

Even an alpha preview version of some such features might be enough to persuade them...

Thanks
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Postby JIDE Support » Sat Mar 17, 2007 9:01 am

I believe Sun is working on Visata L&F as it is a platform L&F. Just like we did Office2003 L&F while Sun did Windows XP L&F, we will do the Office2007 L&F. But I don't have ETC for it yet although we are actively working on it.

For partial transparency, I believe JDK6 supports it already. You can see two screenshots at
http://www.jidesoft.com/images/vista-demo.png
http://www.jidesoft.com/images/vista-office2003.png

I believe Sun is working on the animation part as well. Timing framework is an effort on that as well as the Filthy Rich Clients thing (you may google it).

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Postby gigantatron » Sat Mar 17, 2007 10:26 am

Those Vista screenshots just show that a JFrame, when launched on Vista, looks like a native window launched on Vista.

I'm talking about support of partial transparency and transitions within the application regardless of the operating system (even in an applet).

For example, floating frames with partially transparent surrounds & shadows; floating frames which "fade out" when hidden; partially transparent menus and tooltips with shadows; very slight transparency on docked frames (revealing a wallpaper); transitions such as "wipes"/"fades" when a panel's content changes.

The two-tone "shiny" look found throughout Office 2007 and most Flex apps is also widely seen as bang-up-to-the-minute by users (personally I find it a little naff, but the customer is always right!).

Play around with backgrounds, alpha sliders and dialogs etc. in e.g.
http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/consult ... lorer.html
to get an idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I'm afraid that to keep up with the (purely cosmetic) beauty of Flex and the latest MS stuff, Swing has a way to go, and we have to look to the likes of Jidesoft to lead the way...
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Postby JIDE Support » Sat Mar 17, 2007 6:17 pm

I see what you mean. The two-tone shiny look you mentioned will be in our Office2003 L&F too. Not all transparent visual styles can be done in Java right now because Swing doesn't support transparent top level window. But I heard they will support it in JDK7 which means there is still a long way to go before we can do those. In general, I think Swing community is aware of this and have been working hard to make it. Filthy Rich Clients and the new Nimbus L&F are all part of the effort. We will certainly do something in this area too.

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Postby gigantatron » Sun Mar 18, 2007 5:11 am

Unfortunately, waiting for "the Swing Community" (especially SwingLabs/java.net) to do anything useful is like Waiting for Godot ;-(

Java 7 (Dolphin) is not due until mid-2008, by which time my company, and much of the rest of the world, will already have given up on swing, and opted for something very shiny but functionally-poor (in most cases, Flex).

In any case, "Filthy Rich" applications like the Aerith demo will still be way out of the reach of most developers even with Dolphin. Dolphin might add some tools (animation framework, JOGL) to help create such a look and feel, but will give you nothing useful out of the box, as far as I can tell.

GlassPanes are already available in Swing, as are complex transitions (see java.awt.image.BufferedImageOp) and even though I'm no java2d expert, I can get decent results from them without too much work. I think that a close approximation of Flex/Aerith-type looks are perfectly achievable without Java 7.

However, as I don't control the Jide source I can't integrate these effects seamlessly into my Jide application and Jide components, so that I get them "for free".
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Postby JIDE Support » Sun Mar 18, 2007 4:41 pm

You can always purchase JIDE source code. Even if you don't, you can create your own UI (ButtonUI, DockableFrameUI etc.) to do those kind of stuffs without seeing JIDE source code. Those technologies are already available now as separate open source projects without waiting for Java 7. But it is obviously not a small task. In Office 2007 L&F, we will try to mimic the animation styles they do. But again, I doubt we can mimic perfectly in all cases but we will try our best (and in Swing's best).

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Postby genscan » Mon Apr 14, 2008 8:39 am

Hi all,
One year later, I still support gigantatron post on transition effect.
Since, we played a lot with Timing Framework (BSD) or Scene Graph and it's really fun to design apps with this kind of tools.
If JIDE could support transition in the Office2007 LnF,or the whole component list, this could be a killer API for Swing community.
Thanks.
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Postby gigantatron » Wed Apr 23, 2008 1:04 pm

I was looking for another post of mine and noticed a new post on this thread ... glad I'm not the only one sorely missing easy-to-use transition effects.

Not sure what "Scene Graph" is, I'll Google. I've played with the SwingX timing framework - it makes it slightly easier to trigger animations, but it wasn't really that hard to begin with. The hard bit is integrating all the snazzy effects into a pluggable LaF which does it all for you.

So how is Jide's Office2007 LaF going? Any chance of a beta soon? There seems to be something of a consensus that users aren't taking to Office 2007 at all (the app, rather than the LaF), with lots of people rolling back to Office 2003. Too different. Microsoft innovate for once and it goes down like a cup of cold sick ;-)

And on a wistful note, a year later I can still click up a Flex app in ten minutes (using FlexBuilder) which is almost gorgeous enough to make me want to learn JavaScript.
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Postby gigantatron » Tue Jul 29, 2008 3:27 pm

As I write, 2704 views on this thread - I think it's fair to say there is a lot of interest in Vista/Office 2007-style effects/looks! How is it going? Even an alpha would be welcome!

Thanks
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Postby JIDE Support » Tue Jul 29, 2008 3:33 pm

I totally understand. I felt bad about it too. The original developer on this project was seriously sick and wasn't able to finish the work even though it is about 70% done. I couldn't find another resource to finish it as it requires a quite high level of Swing programming skills to be able to handle this task. I might take this task myself once I finish my current project.

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