I came across this blog today and it is nice to see that people are trying out the Nimbus L&F even at this early stage.

ThinkFree Office with Nimbus

These screenshots highlight some of the problems we are going to have with getting applications to look good with Nimbus. You can see that a lot of the screen particualy the toolbars and menubar are done with custom components. This raises the issue of getting these to look good with nimbus. Hopefully we can provide some utility classes to help developers to skin custom components. For example that can paint standard gradients and symbols or get L&F colors.

I have put together a spec based on all the designs for the new Nimbus L&F. It is no where near complete yet but If you would like a glimpse at what all the components will look like when done then check out: Nimbus Spec

JProgressBar Gradients

JProgressBar Animations

Richard Bair has kindly put up a webstart demo of SwingSet running Nimbus on Swing Labs.

We have opened the Nimbus project on http://nimbus.dev.java.net/ to the public so you can go there and get the source or sign up to help out

I am sitting here at Desktop Matters conference which is fab. Now that Nimbus has been announced I can blog on it. Nimbus is a new Look and Feel designed by Sun which is going to be avilable in future versions of Solaris and there are a group of us making a pure Java implementation with the aim of making a modern cross platform look and feel. The aim is for Nimbus to support Java 1.5 and newer and based on Synth as far as possible.Nimbus is going to be a public opensource project at java.net and will be available very shortly. Ben Galbraith has some of the design mockups on his blog.As a taster here are a couple screenshots of SwingSet running Nimbus L&F.