Josh On Design

I'm doing lots of pre-JavaOne work right now and I could easily bore you with details of our Java.net Community Leaders meeting on Saturday, but instead I'll tease you with our demo.

Rich, Romain and I put together a really great demo application using Desktop Java and a lot of cool APIs. We showed it at Licensee Day this morning and it went swimmingly so I have high hopes for the full presentation tomorrow during the Tuesday morning General Session. I can't tell you any more details, but you'll know it when you see it. After the demo on stage we'll activate a page on java.net for you to get a closer look.

Okay, so that was another tease. To tide you over until tomorrow I'll show you some screenshots of a new framework I'm working on for SwingLabs. Called the Overlay Framework, it will make a lot of complex effects ridiculously easy. Want to draw a translucent badge on top of any textfield with invalid data? Just stuff a painter into the ValidationOverlay and it will take care of the rest. Want to do drag and drop with translucent previews? It'll be just a couple of lines of code with the GhostDragOverlay.

For a couple of years I've been playing around with this idea of a magnifying glass that would work on any application. Well this weekend I finally sat down to write it. I think it came out pretty well. What do you think:

Yes, it is really magnifying anything in the frame under the glass. Yes, Swing apps really can look good! All of this code and more will be available in SwingLabs just as soon as JavaOne is over and I take a week of rest. Until then, keep watching the blogs!