Jeff Dillon

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10 Jun · Thu 2004

Java: The XP Look and Feel
The Windows XP Look and Feel found in Java 1.4.2 and above is absolutely awesome. I really wish that Swing would have foucused on making a look and feel like this before. The company that I was previously employed by has two main installation products. One is a native windows product and the other is a Java product. The XP look and feel was so good that in certain places the Windows UI design team was producing screenshots of the Java product and showing it to the Windows developers to improve the Windows product. As an example, they actually wanted the native windows product to use the tabs (JTabbedPane) that appear in the Java XP look and feel. If you compare the two products even today, the native windows product still has uglier looking tabs.

I really hope the Java team continues to get to move ahead on desktop specific technologies even with J2EE and J2ME being so popular. The XP and GTK look and feel are really great.

@ 10:51 PM PDT

Comments:

Yep, those two are a step forward, however both leave much to be desired. Antialiansing text first comes to mind, especially subpixel AA text (which Java2D doesn't support yet, the team just started investigating it), which combined with honoring OS settings should give much better integration of Swing components into native desktop (1.5.0 beta2 does honor Gnome default AA settings in GTK l&f! now give me subpixel AA and I could actually use Java fine on my LCD's). Then, very nice winlaf project on Java.net (which I can't access right now) fixes a lot of small issues with windows look and especially feel. Annoying things that still make Swing a little but noticably different than native widgets. Their patch should really be part of standard Java. GTK l&f is a nice addition to Java on Linux, but it ignores lots of themes/engines and is very poor performing with some. Lastly, absolutely no work went into KDE integration, and I hope someone with more time than me will jump in and make Swing blend nicely into that very popular Linux DE. A little more polishing and things would suddenly look great for Desktop Swing Java.

Posted by Filip on June 11, 2004 at 06:21 AM PDT #

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