A slightly quieter week this week, but in fact there is a heap of very useful, well-considered posts this week. Be sure to check out the links below as there is plenty of useful information!

Swing

• Kirill Grouchnikov has improved menus in his Flamingo project by adding support for toggle menu buttons and also detailing how to create multi-level menus. In a separate post Kirill discusses improvements to toggle menu buttons related to showing checkmarks, and preventing a menu from auto-hiding when the user selects an item within it.

JavaFX

• Amy Fowler has blogged about the promotion of the 'managed' property from LayoutInfo to Node, and at the same time covers the implication of this move. Well worth reading if you don't understand what managed / unmanaged nodes are.
• Tor Norbye has done a very useful blog post discussing pixel considerations in Java / JavaFX. Basically, if you're wondering why your lines look blurred, this post explains why - and how to fix it. If you're doing anything in JavaFX, you really should read this post.
• Rakesh Menon has shown how to use the preview TreeView control we released in 1.3. You should read this as it shows the alternative way of building a tree on-demand. It's a very nice feature of the TreeView API.
• Peter Karich has posted a 'matchstick graph editor' on JFXStudio. For others creating fun little apps, in any stage of implementation, please consider posting details about it to JFXStudio - contact me for details.
• Jim Clarke has ported Jim Weaver's 3D demo I mentioned last week to work on a TV. You can read all about the porting (basically mapping keys to the remote control), and watch a video, on Jim Weaver's blog.
• Johannes Schneider has posted about 'Closing the gap between Java and JavaFX' by making it easier to bind between JavaFX and Java code. He says that this will eventually end up in the JFXtras project.
• Sten Anderson has released Music Explorer FX 2.0, which has significant improvements over earlier releases.
• I came across the 'getting started with the JavaFX Composer' tutorial this week, and whilst I don't know it's age, I thought it might be useful for people wanting to play with this JavaFX RAD plugin for NetBeans.

That's us for another week. Thanks to everyone for writing these useful posts, and as always please contact me if you think I missed something or should include a link next week. Keep up the hard work folks! :-)