During Devoxx 2008 we were preparing demos for the JavaFX Keynote including a demo for JavaFX Production Suite called Swish. Swish is a demo where we take a photoshop file of graphics and an Illustrator file with animation paths and put together a small animation using those resources in JavaFX. Then we can take a new set of graphics and paths and swap them out with the same code and get a completely new look for the animation. You can watch the standard version of the Swish demo on the  JavaFX Videos page on the video called “Designer-Developer Workflow”.

The original graphics

The alternative graphics

At Devoxx Danny Coward asked if we could tweak the graphics and add a Devoxx logo or similar. I asked Stephan Janssen if he could send me some of the Devoxx graphics and he sent me the graphics that were being projected behind the speaker and slides on the big screens. As I am a perfectionist and can never do the simple thing I spent some of the day before the keynote creating a complete Devoxx theme for the Swish demo.

Devoxx themed graphics

When I showed the graphics to Stephan Janssen he said half joking (I think!) wouldn’t it be cool if we could replace the graphics behind the slides and speaker with this animation. After some discussions we worked out that if I could create a full HD video loop 1920×1080 then they had the technology to project that on the big cinema screens. So not to be one to let a challenge go by I created a full HD version of the graphics and we ran the JavaFX application on Martin’s MacBook Pro as it was the only machine we had access to with full HD resolution screen. We then screen recorded it and spent the rest of the night creating and encoding a video loop. So while everyone was walking into the room and during the performances by the Beatboxer Roxorloops our video was playing on the big screen.

Devoxx animation of big screen

It was a whole pile of fun so maybe next year Stephan can arrange a machine which we can install JavaFX and have animated backgrounds for all the talks. I think we were all impressed that JavaFX could pull off full HD animation, makes me want to write a video titling tool in JavaFX

Over the last couple months Richard Bair, Martin Brehovsky and I presented talks introducing JavaFX at Devoxx 2008, Sun Paris Tech Day and IJTC 2009 (Irish Java Technologies Conference). There are 2 versions a longer one for Devoxx and a more condensed version for Paris and IJTC. For those of you interested here are the slides and demos:

Slides

Devoxx Slides PDF

IJTC Slides PDF

Demo

During the talks we built up a simple demo with what you learn in each section.

Here are the links so you can webstart the demos for the different sections, I started at Demo 2d as that is the first version with working close button which is always helpful

Here is the Netbeans project and source files for these demos so you can play with them.

Netbeans-Project.zip

My colleague Amy Fowler has written a excellent article explaining how layout works and will work in JavaFX. Its great after many months of working on this stuff to see it explained so well. If you have not read it so far and you are interested in JavaFX then what are you doing still reading me waffle, go read it!

Layout Primer for JavaFX1.0 - Amy Fowler

A friend forwarded a email to me a couple days ago from a researcher who wanted to record children sketching on a computer using a graphics tablet. So they could play it back later and watch how they did it etc. It sounded like a cool little app and as I was bored while waiting for a plane back from the IJTC conferance I thought I would have a quick go, how hard can it be

(more…)

When I was creating the prize draw application I needed to work out the Spline interpreter numbers to make the names thud down. I ended up using Romain Guy’s Spline Editor for Swing which makes it nice and easy. So thought it was about time we had a JavaFX version, and it could not be too hard. So a couple hours and a couple hundred bind statements later we have a very cool little Spline Editor that lets you edit the spline and see the effect in real time then copy the code to paste into your JavaFX application.

If you would like to try it for your self click here: you can also download the source Netbeans project.