Nimbus: Large, Small, Mini Components
In the original design for Nimbus there were large,small and mini versions of components. Small and mini components are very useful when you are creating tool pallets or other UI where space is very tight. Apple recently added this to their new look and feel in the latest java versions see Technical Note TN2196. We are using the same client property key and values as Apple to be compatible but I have also added “large” as a option. Not sure “large” is as useful as “small” or “mini” but might look good in wizards or dialogs. Check out the screenshot to see how they look. 
December 7th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
The small and mini scrollbar arrow buttons look kinda edgy in the screenshot. I have a tinny problem with some of the colors you chose for progress bars and window decorations and an even tinier with the asymmetry in the scroll bars but other than that it looks truly great!
December 7th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Hi, Jasper,
I’m quite looking forward to the release of Nimbus. I have a couple of questions about the screenshot included, here, though. First, will the radio button and check box text be aligned so that they have the same horizontal start position, i.e., the radio buttons look like they’re shifted a little to far to the right. Second, the arrows on the scroll bars look great, but the arrows on the combo boxes and spinners don’t look like they’re scaled properly for the different sizes. For example, the arrows for the large combo boxes are smaller than the rest which are all the same size. And the arrows on the small and mini spinners look bigger than the arrows on the regular size spinner.
On the whole it all looks terrific, btw.
Cheers,
Shaun
December 8th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
looks awesome. any release dates?
December 10th, 2007 at 6:11 am
[…] Potts posted an update on the Nimbus development progress. The screenshot shows the support for the different component […]
December 11th, 2007 at 12:10 am
We develop a java based point of sale system that is run on terminals with a touch screen. The large components are just what the doctor ordered! If anything is there a way to make them larger, or to turn them on for all components?
December 11th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Josh Marinacci: This will be in Early Access build 09 of 6uN which should be out after christmas. Final release is not firm yet but mid next year is a good guess.
Paradox: Intresting example use case, it the moment that is not possible but could be done. I will think about adding that functionality in if I get a chance. What components do you need to be big?
December 13th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Nimbus: Large, Small, Mini Components…
[…]In the original design for Nimbus there were large,small and mini versions of components. Small and mini components are very useful when you are creating tool pallets or other UI where space is very tight. Apple recently added this to their new lo…
December 13th, 2007 at 11:37 am
We also use Touchscreens and we need the RadioButtons and Checkboxes to be big.
December 30th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Nimbus looks great; glad to see it moving along. I did a little experiment this afternoon — extracted Nimbus from the 6N JDK to put it into its own jar file, then ran that with the normal JRE. That worked just fine, as far as I could tell. I then pulled down the scene graph API that’s being inserted into the JavaFX code base, and used it to create a small tree of Nimbus-style components…all was well with that too. Transforms messed up Nimbus because of its caching, so I did a little reflection-mining and turned off all of the caching. There’s a slight drop in speed, but computers are getting faster, so I can live with it.
The bottom line is that I was able to have very nice looking anti-aliased Nimbus components doing all kinds of animated tricks (through the scene graph’s animation API), and it all stayed perfectly “swing”, and interactive, the whole time.
Obviously Nimbus hasn’t been released yet so who knows where it’s going, but if you haven’t already done so I’d very much hope that you’ll add (if necessary) and document any “switches” necessary to use this look and feel when arbitrary transforms are in place, and perhaps even have an understanding of when animation is being performed.
A “transform-compliant” Nimbus makes it quite easy to create zooming user interfaces, and I’m sure many other types of UIs as well.
Hope to see Nimbus soon!