Today I was talking to a good friend and former colleague and he asked how I would go about laying out a collection of controls as if they were equally spread out around the edge of an ellipse. I did a quick Google and didn’t find much in the way of examples, so I decided to knock one together. An hour later and we have what I present here.

Button click masks (known as hot spots in the web world) offer a way to transform rectangular artwork into non-rectangular clickable or hover-able areas. It’s often easier to draw graphics in Adobe Fireworks or Photoshop rather than Java 2D - either for expedience in prototyping or because the graphics are too complex to draw programmatically.

We are always looking to come up with the post that is attractive and useful for everyone. We most of the time focuses on the designer’s stuff and where anything is going to launch free of cost. There are countless designer’s free stuff available which everyone should review at least once. In this post, I have collected 17 Most Desirable Designers Collection.

Following the extremely valuable feedback on the previous entry that introduced the application menu button and application taskbar to the Flamingo ribbon component, i have been busy this week fixing the usability issues and addressing some of the missing popup functionality available in the Office 2007 Command Bar component.

Retro Style Photoshop Tutorials

Following the recent releases of Groovy 1.5.7 and 1.6-beta-2 I'm proud to announce the release of JideBuilder 2.0.

There's a simple article with explanations and example, how you could write own form-helper methods for a ruby-on-rails based project, so they were beautiful and handy like the built-in ones.

Maybe the most important part of a good media player is how usable it is and how good it looks when minimized. Ultimately you should be able to do everything you can do with the full interface yet the real estate should be as small as possible and never be in the way. Obviously there is a lot of hard decisions to make since we don’t live in the ultimate world. Yet.

Keeping it "short 'n sweet," WinFuture has posted some screenshots of build 6801. Check out the image below with the spiffy new wallpaper, then go visit WinFuture via the reference link below the screenshot to see the rest of them!

Apple has patented the OS X Dock, nearly a decade after the operating system made its public debut with a new slant on the taskbar. The late arrival isn't due to a lack of initiative, however. Apple applied for the patent December 20, 1999, and it was approved by the US Patent Office only yesterday.

In addition to building Web and console applications with Ruby, you can write complex GUI desktop applications that run unmodified on multiple platforms. Thanks to JRuby, a robust alternative to the traditional C implementation of Ruby, Ruby GUI toolkits can use UI tools available to the Java™ platform. This article introduces Monkeybars, a library that uses JRuby and Swing for building applications, and takes you through an example application.

And finally we have an Ajax TreeView Control :)

In addition to building Web and console applications with Ruby, you can write complex GUI desktop applications that run unmodified on multiple platforms. Thanks to JRuby, a robust alternative to the traditional C implementation of Ruby, Ruby GUI toolkits can use UI tools available to the Java™ platform. This article introduces Monkeybars, a library that uses JRuby and Swing for building applications, and takes you through an example application.

Wicket’s component and OO nature make it very easy to create plugins which affect the UI in different ways. In this article we are going to build a simple application that allows the user to create an article for a (Wicket based) CMS and configure how it should be deployed. Out of the box we are going to support a fictional FTP and HTTP POST deployers, each with their own configuration data and editors. We are going to abstract the deployer into a plugin system so new ones can be easily created and added to the application. The sample project provided works with Hibernate, Spring, and Wicket.

I'm in the market for a new phone and I've been considering getting an iPhone 3G to replace my AT&T Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser). The Tilt is a great PDA (thanks to Windows Mobile 6) and I love the slide out QWERTY keyboard. My main problems with it are the relatively huge physical size, small amount of storage space and needing two hands if I want to send email or text messages.

The developers of RText, a pure Java programmers text editor have split out the syntax highlighting component of their text editor into it's own project: RSyntaxTextArea. This component seems to be very mature, and extensible. Also appears to be pretty easy to add new languages to the editor; either provide a JFlex lexer or code one my hand.

Ahhh, the old table-doesn’t-fill-the-view problem. Nothing says “this is a Swing app” more than a JTable that only fills up part of it’s parent JViewport. Apparently this behavior was not the original behavior (as I had once thought), but was introduced, presumably as a bug, back in Java 1.2 (see this bug report). This behavior has been fixed in Java 6, though not by default - you have to call JTable.setFillsViewportHeight(true).

Written by Lennon and McCartney and released on the B-side of The Beatles' Hey Jude single record 40 years ago, these lyrics to "Revolution" have been a rallying cry for causes and corporations. As I was checking referrers to this blog today, I noticed that a fairly new site name RIA Revolution contains a link to my Some Perspective in JavaFX post. According to their About page, "RIA Revolution is a community site for all things RIA [Rich Internet Applications]. The site features news, stories, podcasts, screen casts and videos to keep you updated about the happenings in the RIA World." As I mentioned, it's a new site, but I'm excited about its "revolutionary" tone, and about watching it continue to be populated with "all things RIA".

In my previous post in this series, I presented a trivial Echo GUI written in Groovy. By using SwingBuilder and closures, the code for the GUI was dramatically simplified compared to the Java version. But Groovy can go beyond that. In this post, I’ll talk about the bind method and the @Bindable annotation, which help transform Swing development into the MVC structure of Griffon.

I’ve been relatively quiet on this blog for the last couple of weeks, but i have some good news to share about the Flamingo ribbon component - it now provides the cross-LAF support for application menu button and application taskbar. The ribbon is a fairly complicated container, and while release 3.1 has made great strides towards providing basic functionality, there are significant gaps when compared to the original Office 2007 command bar. The plans for release 4.0 (code-named Fainnear) are to close these gaps, and the latest development drops allow interested applications to test the application menu button and application taskbar.

If you know me you also know that I don't like NetBeans. In fact, I hate it. I hated it when it was called Forte CE and I hate it now. If by any chance you use NetBeans on OSX, you are gonna hate it even more because its look and feel on OSX is simply ugly. Very ugly. Staring at a NetBeans window on OSX is as dangerous as staring directly at the Sun. The only difference is that staring at Sun destroys your eyes while staring at NetBeans destroys your brain.

Long web forms could be scary for users and they could encourage clients to fly away from your site. Although that, it is difficult to make them shorter, specially if you need all that information you are requesting.

Today we are glad to release The DelliPack 2! icon set. This second set of “delicious icons” contains 15 icons: a build icon, a home icon, an interact icon, a monitor icon, a pen icon, a phonebook icon and other icons which can be useful for both corporate and personal projects. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever. You can also take a look at the Dellipack 1: A Free Icon Set

As the monitor resolution and internet speed is advancing, it seems like more and more designers use over-sized photo or illustrated image as the website’s background. Large background image can create the stunning visual effect, especially for high resolution monitors. It can also add more life to your site design compared to the traditional tiled background graphic. Here is a collection of 80 websites that used large image as the site background (must-see, you won’t be disappointed).

How do you get the design you want? The perfect design you envision in your head? … The design brief is the answer. Whether you are a designer or a client, an effective design brief is the single most critical factor in ensuring that a project is successful. This article will tell you how to write an effective design brief that will be both beneficial to the client and the designer.