It looks like the gears are starting to grind again after the new years break, with only a small amount of news this week, but some interesting links nonetheless. Thanks to the people who email me their links – it’s very much appreciated. So, for another week, I hope you enjoy the links, find something new or useful, and I’ll catch you all again in a weeks time.
Swing
- Damien Ielsch emailed me to say that he has just started a new Java2D/AWT/Swing blog. His first post is about adding a subtle fade-in/out on a JTextField prompt text/image. This is nicely done (using Trident) – it is subtle enough to not be annoying. Note that JTextField does not allow for prompt text, but there has been sample code which I’ve linked to in the past that allows for prompt text. In his second post, he covers custom JDialogs/JFrames. Frankly I’m not a huge fan of this kind of dialog, but to each his own.
JavaFX
- The JavaFX team has put out two new articles this week, entitled ‘Easy Animations With the Animated Transitions‘ and ‘Create a Secure JavaFX Application‘.
- The JavaFX team also put out an update to the JavaFX plugin for Eclipse, which brings a bunch of new features since the last release came out in June 2009.
- toumaille has posted a JavaFX level indicator, which may prove to be very useful for some people.
Griffon
- Andres Almiray announced that the Griffon team has just released versions 0.2.1 and 03-BETA-1 of the Griffon framework.
Miscellaneous
- Kirill Grouchnikov has been writing a series of posts introducing the concepts of animation. This is notable due to his work on the Trident animation / timing library he has developed for Java, and which is used in his Substance look and feel, among other things. You can read Animations 101, 102, 103, 201 and 202.
That’s all folks. Catch you next week 
Just curious.. why are you “not a fan” of the custom JDialog/JFrame in the linked article. I visited the site and it looked pretty slick to me. Are there any alternatives to this that you know of? Or.. do you not like dialogs in general.
David, good question, and sorry for not clarifying it in my post.
I guess I like to look through the eyes of end users, and I’m most commonly working with end users in corporate environments. In these situations, if it doesn’t look like a ‘normal’ window, they can become a little scared. For this reason I like to play it safe with the frame ‘chrome’ around my panels.
This is not to say that the approach above is not a good one in some usecases, it just needs to be carefully considered as to how the change in chrome will affect the end users ability to feel comfortable interacting with the software. In most cases they’ll be fine as even Microsoft have no consistent user interface chrome guidelines any longer.
Cheers,
Jonathan
I think also that these dialogs should not be used all the time, i am preparing an article that i will post later this week describing a use i have for this dialog.
Mabs – I look forward to it
Please either email me or leave a comment here for people to be informed.