Comments on: Nimbus: Large, Small, Mini Components

By: aloleary

aloleary — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:41:22 +0000

Yeah I too am working on a POS system and the holy grail here would be a “scale factor” that is applied to all components. Bringing in Vector graphics etc…

That way the UI can be scaled to the screen. I have some screens where the “large” is too large and some where the large is too small…

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:29:04 +0000

Sorry Matt there is no global setting for size, that is again something we could think about adding as it seems sensible.

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:27:46 +0000

Mitch: not at the moment but we can look into it for 7 if we have time as there have been several requests.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:39:04 +0000

Is there a way to make the “large” size larger?

By: matt

matt — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:13:32 +0000

thanks jasper, i found SizeVariants.java in the laffy src.

but it seems as if the size is manually set for each component. i was more looking for something global like

Nimbus.setSize(“mini”);

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:00:49 +0000

matt: Have a look at the src for the Laffy demo as a example https://laffy.dev.java.net/

By: matt

matt — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:03:45 +0000

and how do you activate the small, large and mini styles?

By: Jasper Potts

Jasper Potts — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:43:38 +0000

Art: I was not responsible for the design of Nimbus and it was already implemented as a GTK theme for Solaris and a web version for Sun web apps. So there was no scope for me changing the design. You can simply change the color of the progress bars in Nimbus by changing the “nimbusOrange” color in UIManager, see http://www.jasperpotts.com/blog/2008/08/nimbus-uimanager-uidefaults/ .

To get your design to work with as a Swing skin you will need to create your own subclass of BasicProgressBarUI and then place its class in UIManager under the key “ProgressBarUI”. It will then be used as the skin for all progress bars in your application. You can possible skin Nimbus to look similar though you can not change the animation on the visuals without creating a subclass of BasicProgressBarUI.

By: Art McBain

Art McBain — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:00:37 +0000

Nimbus, overall, looks great and I think presents a nice look and feel for Java. However, I don’t exactly think the colors of the JProgressBars fit the theme. Also, I’m not the only one of this opinion, the indeterminate JProgressBar just doesn’t look right at all. A bit “ugly” compared to the rest. Don’t take too much offense, It’s a small thing compared to the rest of Nimbus (which is quite good).

Something similar to http://www.asmcbain.net/projects/progressbar/preview.progressbar.png might be a bit better. I made a Swing version, available here: http://www.asmcbain.net/projects/temp/ProgressBarDemo.jar which doesn’t look /exactly/ like that image … now I’ve never designed L&Fs, and that ProgressBar needs a little “love” (it behaves oddly when stretched a lot in a certain direction too fast, and it doesn’t follow the JProgressBar API). It doesn’t use any images.

By: Ross Judson

Ross Judson — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 20:14:38 +0000

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!