This is the last major release for JDK 1.4 and earlier. It integrates Laf-Plugin about which I have already written in my personal blog.
This is the last major release for JDK 1.4 and earlier. It integrates Laf-Plugin about which I have already written in my personal blog.
Currently I’m waiting for Stardock to fix a really annoying bug, that was somehow introduced in Windowblinds 5. Menu Bars in UIS1+ skins - Squareness is one of those - now have a fixed background color that is independent of the skin itself. The color is a shade of gray with the RGB 212,208,200. It looks especially awful with Squareness’ bright colors.
Fortunately Stardock acknowledged this to be a bug and will probably look into it soon. Before getting this positive answer, I feared I would have to convert Squareness to a UIS2 skin. While UIS1+ is older than UIS2 it has some advantages. It is more stable and faster than UIS2. Also some applications don’t play nice with UIS2 skins. Since Squareness doesn’t have and also doesn’t need any features only available to UIS1+ skins, I’d like Squareness to stay a UIS1+ skin.
So that’s why there’s still no new release of Squareness for Windowblinds. If the bug gets fixed I’ll release the new version that comes with the announced change to the progress bar and yet another try to fix the task bar (This time it seems to work, though ;) )
I’ve added a Development Blog to this site. On this blog I’ll post all kinds of information and progress reports about the development of all the different skins and tool around Squareness.
The blogging software I’m using here is Wordpress. The theme is mostly done. There are some rough edges left that will be fixed soon.
The Progress Bar in the Squareness skins is going to get a slight change in the next releases of the Windowblinds skin and the Java Look And Feel.
The Progress Bar was originally designed when Windowblinds didn’t have the “Progress Bar XP” feature and painted a beveled border around it. Now that Squareness uses that feature the Progress Bar has a flat look and somehow the gap between the progress bar chunk and the progress bar border doesn’t look all that good anymore.
I have removed those gaps some months ago from my local version of Squareness for Windowblinds and after having tested it for months now I really think it’s an improvement.
The next release of Squareness Look And Feel will be the last major update to the JDK 1.4 version of it. It will integrate the Laf-Plugin which is a nice way to allow the extension of a look and feel for custom Swing components. After that release I will move on to port the look and feel to JDK 5.
You may wonder why porting to JDK 5 is a big deal. In fact the current version of Squareness Look And Feel runs well under JDK 5. With the release of the Synth Look And Feel that allows the definition of a custom look and feel through a XML file, new features were added to the look and feel superclasses also used by Squareness. “Roll Over” effects are available for many components now and some of the superclasses have opened up new extension possibilities. Now it’s possible to change the “previous” and “next” buttons on the TabbedPaneUI without copying the whole code from BasicTabbedPaneUI.
Last but not least there are those nice new language features like Generics that will be used in the port.