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.
When I build custom components (for example a more elaborate progressbarUI) I always try to use the colors from existing components via the UIManager: Label.text, textfield.back, JTable.highlight, etc, etc, or derrive a color from them (darker, lighter). In this way the component usually blends in nicely.
Jasper,
Great job! on the work on Nimbus.
Why can’t this run in Java 1.5.x ?
I have customers that run on 1.5.x that aren’t likely to move to 1.6 anytime soon.
-Carl
I tried out Nimbus for one of my older apps which was using JGoodies. Unfortunately it is highlighting some of my bad code, throwing exceptions as I instantiate some private instance Swing component members prior to the frame or dialog actually firing up. I am sure if I changed my code around it would work.
Tom: We will have a standard set of colors in the UiDefaults like other look and feels that you can use. We also would like to have some public API to help paint Nimbus standard gradients etc to make it easy for custom component developers.
Carl: At the moment Nimbus is based on Synth, there were a large amount of bugs fixed in JDK 6 in Synth that are needed in Nimbus. Also there are new classes for multi step gradients that Nimbus needs. So to start with Nimbus will be JDK 6 only but we would like to make it work with 5. When we have it finished and working for 6 we will look at workaround for any stuff that we need from JDK 6.
Aron: There are lots of bugs in Nimbus at the moment it is still very early days, but if you want to send in the exception in case it is not one we have see we will look at it. When we are finished Nimbus should not require any changes to you code to work though to make it look really good you may need to change some of the spacing etc as the components will be different sizes.