Teppefall Labs

Hi, I usually like your design work (quite a bit, actually), at least what I know from your blog--I have to ask, on the top screenshot, what exactly is the top line of the tabs to the right aligned with? Same on the left, top icon. Why are these two lowered by a few pixels relative to the top border of the central panel? I'm sure you have your reasons, and I'd love to know--looks, to my untrained eye, odd.

Cheers
Patrick

Left component is one week old, middle is six months old and the right was done 18 months ago. I am simply reusing JFC/JXML layout code and the difference is a result of left being Panel-Panel-ToggleButton while right is TabbedPane-Panel-Panel.

I use a visual tool to generate the UI code, so stuff like this only gets fixed when all the primary layout code is completed. It is too expensive to fix alignments before the UI feature specification is complete. Sometimes I have to redo the layout and check it on three platforms and six LAF's. There is also platform specific layout code dynamically altering the UI at runtime. So basically, fixing alignments is very tedious.

The problem is deciding on what is a "normal alignment". But you are probably correct about one side being misaligned. A guy named Karsten Lentzsch (jgoodies.com) probably wrote a paper about this and I probably forgot to read it.