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Components

Standart Swing components UIs or shells for easy usage

Branch “styling”

 

I have added a temporary project branch styling on GitHub WebLaF project page – almost all new changes are added there right now. This branch contains changes required to enable styling support for all existing components. It isn’t stable right now and might even be uncompilable sometimes, but as soon as I finish adding modifications it will be merged into the master branch and I will finally be able to release v1.29 update.

I was going to postpone a lot of those changes and release only small chunks one by one but that would force me to add even more workarounds for older parts of the code. So I have finally decided to finish it in one sweep. Originally this was the goal of v1.40 release, but it is coming sooner than expected. Some improvements will still be made on the way to v1.40 release, but the main part will be added in v1.29 update and it won’t be a simple preview – it will be fully working styling system.

So let me go into some specifics of changed you can expect…

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WebLookAndFeel and Nine-patch

 

Library got a large bunch of updates and upgrades since last version and i today i will tell about the main one – new Nine-patch editor and styling hidden within the library. 
First of all i will tell a bit about nine-patch format for those who still don’t know anything…

Nine-patch

Nine-patch is an image format that holds some additional information inside png-format image meta-data or inside the picture itself.

Here you can see a simple example of nine-patch image (it is also set as default image in editor):

 

As you can see there are four black-colored lines on the image sides – that is additional data that nine-patch format provides.
Each line on the left and top sides presents stretchable image areas – those parts of image will be sized with the component they are used on.
Each line on the right and bottom sides presents content areas (they might also be empty) – in those parts of image component content will be placed (for example – button text and icon).

That is basically all you need to know about that format to make it useful inside you application with WebLookAndFeel library!
If you want to know more – you might find this post and official Android dev guide useful.

I will tell you about nine-patch files usage a bit later – let’s check the format editor first…

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WebLookAndFeel v.1.2 released

 

So here we go! Second big update since the release of alpha-version.
It took me almost a month and lots of effort to finish this release.
It is still in alpha-state but since next (1.3) version it will become beta.

Also, hopefully, 1.4 version will already be stable and since that version there will be a lot of changes coming in library and on this site aswell.

So, let’s get back to new 1.2 version and see what is new in it…

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WebLookAndFeel v.1.1 released

 

First large update is here!
You can download new library version from Download page.

Some of new features/improvements are:

– A bit new JButton and JToggleButton styling:

– Improved buttons rollover reaction:

– New custom-shaped tooltips:

– And also custom-content tooltips:

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Extended components set

 

I want to describe the “extended components” part of the library a bit more in this post, so let’s see what is that exactly and how You can use it.

You might find similar components in lots of other libraries, but i assure You – some of them are presented only here. And even more – the whole library is presented in the same design concept as the standart Swing-components UI’s from WebLookAndFeel.

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First sketches

 

Today i would like to tell you about new upcoming Java-project which is still on its way to first release – WebLookAndFeel. It is cross-platform Java LookAndFeel with lots of useful extended components (which are also styled the same way as WebLookAndFeel) and features (like lots of usefuly Utils-classes, Swing-extensions and others).

(Don’t miss screenshots under the cut!)

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