Comments on: Nimbus Early Access

By: Larry Barowski

Larry Barowski — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 02:00:05 +0000

Using “defaultFont” shows the same problem as just scaling all the UIDefaults fonts - some fonts scale but most don’t. I would also suggest you scale fonts by default based on the system DPI, as the Windows L&Fs do on Windows and the Mac L&Fs do on Macs (but Metal and Motif L&Fs don’t). Otherwise, on high dpi systems, the fonts are too small. In our app we compensate for that on Metal and Motif by applying the DPI scaling ourselves automatically (as well as allowing the user to globally scale the UI fonts by any amount on top of that). Not having time is something I well understand, but in my opinion global font scaling is a major usability issue for a L&F.

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:57:59 +0000

Larry: We always planned Nimbus to be scaleable and put effort into making it possible at the core. We just never had time to finish it so did not expose control. Hopefully this is something we can resolve when we do Nimbus for JDK 7. On changing the font, try setting the “defaultFont” key in UIManager probably before Nimbus is loaded but should work after but I have never tried.

By: Larry Barowski

Larry Barowski — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:12:36 +0000

So will there be a way to scale the UI globally? If so, is this available yet? I didn’t see anything in the methods or UIDefaults that looked promising. Under all previous Sun L&Fs except GTK, it is possible to scale all fonts by iterating through the UIDefaults and replacing every font value with a scaled instance, but this doesn’t work under Nimbus because it uses some of those fonts/sizes but not others - trying to do so futzes up the layouts. That is not a problem if there is a way to do a global UI scale which includes all fonts.

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:00:47 +0000

Thanks Adam you are right the package for Nimbus changed between early builds and the beta. I will release a blog with more info about the beta once I am back from vacation next week.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:38:59 +0000

Unless I’m making a n00b mistake, you should update the instructions to load Nimbus. It should be:

UIManager.setLookAndFeel(”com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel”);

not UIManager.setLookAndFeel(”sun.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel”); (this is what you have). The method you have will not work (at least for me using the java6u10 beta installed on April 8).

By: Mario

Mario — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:14:32 +0000

Ah! Thanks much. So at the moment, is there a work-around that will allow me to view the rest of my application in Nimbus and simply have the renderer based items fall back to some other default (OS, other LAF, etc…). Can I set some of those keys directly after switching to Nimbus?

Basically I would like to be able to start reviewing and testing with the LAF, both for our purposes as well as for providing feedback, however we cannot do so without our tables.

Thanks again!

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:43:59 +0000

Mario: There is some big issue with renderers with Trees, Tables, Lists and Combos which is being worked on at the moment in bug 6595814 it should be fixed in b11 or b12. This issue is related to the same problem.

By: Mario

Mario — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:58:01 +0000

Hello,

I was wondering if there was any resolution to the issue with the NullPointerException regarding the exception posted above on 11-9-2007. I think this is a result of the previous questions regarding certain keys in UIManager returning null in general.

I took a look through the bug database with the keyword nimbus AND JTable and I couldn’t find any issue like the above. Can someone point me to the correct location for the issue, or for a workaround if there is one?

Thanks in advance!

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 01:11:19 +0000

Rich: I will look into it on monday. Seems like a funny error.

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:48:34 +0000

I’d put this on the sun bug database for you, but I just can’t put up with it this evening! I get it setting the LnF to nimbus with the latest weekly build.

Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-0″ java.lang.NullPointerException
at javax.swing.JTable.setSelectionBackground(JTable.java:2454)
at javax.swing.plaf.synth.SynthTableUI.updateStyle(SynthTableUI.java:117)
at javax.swing.plaf.synth.SynthTableUI.installDefaults(SynthTableUI.java:95)
at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicTableUI.installUI(BasicTableUI.java:1354)
at javax.swing.JComponent.setUI(JComponent.java:673)
at javax.swing.JTable.setUI(JTable.java:3526)
at javax.swing.JTable.updateUI(JTable.java:3582)
at javax.swing.JTable.(JTable.java:614)
at javax.swing.JTable.(JTable.java:539)
at org.htu.tsd.Table.(Table.java:28)
at org.htu.tsd.TSDFrame.initComponents(TSDFrame.java:120)
at org.htu.tsd.TSDFrame.(TSDFrame.java:30)
at org.htu.tsd.TSDFrame$13.run(TSDFrame.java:358)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:597)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:273)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:183)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:173)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:168)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:160)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:121)