If anyone can tell me how to do a variable height Jlist cell renderer that supports in-line HTML links and correct text flow, than I'm all ears. I'm just completely stumped. Hans Muller and Scott Violet have both failed to create such a renderer.

I was thinking HyperlinkListener and JEditorPane, but that doesn't seem to work at all. You can do something like this, but that doesn't solve the problem. The links are not active and the text is obscured. (Kvitre's frame resize grabber is in the top left, rather than right bottom)

The border color blending is also a challenge.

Only the top graphic is hardcoded. Everything else is Java 2D and icons.

Posted by JP at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are some prototypes that didn't make it. I'm not saying that they will never be made. I just don't see a marked for them at this time.

Image scaler

Twitter client

Application lancher (think AIR)

Internet login (think Valve Steam)

Color palettes

Posted by JP at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Watch Burt Rutan (Scaled Composites) on iJustine's QIK stream showing off "Eve".

And.. just in case.. cute can be replaced by "intelligent", "smart", "clever", "well read", "organized", "impressive", "normal", "standard", "some", "random", "one", "a" and many other words and articles in the English dictionary. But I'm tired right now and "cute" sounds better as a title. So there ! Man Power ! Bææææ !

Posted by JP at 01:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just playing around with Java 1.6.0_10-beta-b23. The shaped window is a bit ugly in the edges, but this is the best I can do for now. The resizing is a bit wonky as well. I have to redesign parts of the LAF if I want something better. Might be too much work, who knows. The transparent window feature is working well, but might be too annoying. Also, the top black area lets you drag the entire application. This guy got some huge skills.

Kvitre is just a byproduct of Capture. My plan was to check out the JavaFX media stack before I release something, but that is taking forever so who knows. Feels extremely stupid to release code that depends on Java Media code from the stone age. And the Jmyron video decoder that I use is great for crashing virtual machines. Sun needed all this time just to implement something that was cool seven years ago (Windows XP from 2001) ? Does not bode well for JavaFX.

I would say that 1.6.0_10-beta-b23 is really Swing 1.0. Now we actually match native code for the first time.

A lot of noise about Sun developers leaving for Adobe. Who cares ? Adobe Flex needs all the help it can get. The bullshit factor is through the roof. Flex and GWT are fighting over the prestigious “most horrible user experience” award. I thought we Swing developers had that shit down.. but now we got competition !

Background images by Taylor.

Posted by JP at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I am not sure if people are aware of this, but you can run Teppefall FX scripts within Teppefall Layout.

Also, here is Colorspace in Titanium White LAF.

Posted by JP at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It was never my intention to write Teppefall applications in Javascript, but here is a simple example on how to do it. The update system, the DSR (Teppefall Runtime) launcher and some Application logic is not available at this time because of dependency problems. It is hard to use Javascript when the concept of a Class is replaced with something else. And working with all kinds of adapter logic is also pretty confusing.

If you want to run this example, just move the /network_app folder into the Teppefall SDK root folder and run Network.cmd or NetworkOSX.sh. This demo showcases plugins, the taskbar icon, layout and basic setup.

You have to download Teppefall Layout to get the original layout file used in this example.

Teppefall SDK Javascript example: network_app.zip

network.js
network_plugins.js

Continue reading "Writing Teppefall applications in Javascript" »

Posted by JP at 07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a lot of tricky logic in this application that is not so obvious just by looking at some screen shots. There are the delicious differences between Windows XP and Vista on how they deal with shared native libraries. There are minimum two gotchas. One, if you link against stuff like Visual C++ or MingW32 G++ you must add the C++ library to your application base path on Vista. It will not work the way it does on XP, where the DLL can just be on the system path. Second, any custom JNI library must be added to the system path before a VM is created. Just setting java.library.path will not work on Vista -if- the path is not the base path (“.”).

Continue reading "Teppefall Capture – From prototype to application" »

Posted by JP at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This application is still a work in progress, but I am tired of keeping it a secret so here is the dirt. Teppefall Capture is a simple Photo Booth clone. By simple I mean it is built on the FX/Layout stack, has an OpenGL powered live preview (JOGL + TextureRenderer) and gets its video feed from a custom video capture library.

Continue reading "Introducing Teppefall Capture" »

Posted by JP at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Experimenting with a new white version of Titanium LAF. It is pretty difficult to create something that is not completely bland. Car white is a complex creature indeed. Especially when trying to turn it into a usable user interface.

Also been playing around with a Photoshop Express clone. Testing out transparent components, live image resizing, huge bitmaps and custom renderer's. Performance is not where I want it to be, even when using the latest early access builds from Sun. But I think it is more about CPU performance than GPU, so some tweaking might make it better.

Continue reading "Photoshop Express in Java and Titanium White LAF" »

Posted by JP at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the first screenshots of Project Amanda. These are UI mockups done in Darkstar Layout and all the code is in XML and Javascript. Please understand that this is not a real application. This is a super-duper alpha and it might not get built at all.

Darkstar Layout does not support includes, but it does support Java components. So I am simply creating multiple Layout objects (com.teppefall.ds.layout.Layout) within one Layout object and replacing the layout at runtime through drag and drop. So these four UI states are actually made up of eight XML files. Each a component on its own and reusable in other applications.

Project Amanda might become a small rich Internet application developer environment. It is simply a remix of my current code base. Colorspace is the most downloaded application so far, so there might be some interest in fast, to the point, creative tools. I might use some of Adobe's RIA standards to keep things simple.

But again.. this is just me thinking out loud.

Continue reading "Screenshots of Project Amanda (prototype)" »

Posted by JP at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Something I am working on. Might be the next application. Who knows.

Posted by JP at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been playing a little with Kirill's SVG to Java transcoder and then manually converting the Java code into Javascript based Darkstar FX renderer's. Very tedious, but good fun nevertheless. I had less success with the SVG to JavaFX converter, but that might just be a case of me using old software.

There are at least four SVG importer pipelines available for Java, so there seems to be some interest in this.

• Batik


• Kirill Grouchnikov - SVG to Java transcoder (based on Batik)


• Chris Oliver - SVG to JavaFX transcoder


• Jasper Potts - SVGShapeExtractor
  

Posted by JP at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

You don't have to use Java in order to create Darkstar applications. Here is a simple project I wrote in Python - py_dsi.zip.

Continue reading "Writing Darkstar applications in Python" »

Posted by JP at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Press this link if you have Java 6.

The application might hang due to a thread/UI/IO problem. This is labs.teppefall.com after all. It is probably a race condition. I changed the threading code last week and it bit me in the ass.

Posted by JP at 03:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Has anyone implemented a multibutton like this ? Mac OS X use them in tabs and they are common in tools like Dreamweaver.

Posted by JP at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Intelligent forms should make the JFC experience more inviting. Subtle hints are more user friendly than "ERROR ERROR" after move, click, move, click, move, click, click, etc. The inspiration comes from the Web 2.0 movement, but the concept is very old. Very 1999 I guess.

This is just a Photoshop mock-up by myself, but according to some trusted sources we might see this functionality very soon.

Posted by JP at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote a Apollo/Flex compiler this week that compiles into 100% Java. Just a toy.. it implements like 1,5 percent of Flex and has no Actionscript or SWF support.

You can transcode SWF to Java FX, Actionscript can be mapped to Java.. but that still means no video, no mp4 and no video capture support. There is no point.. People use Flash BECAUSE it supports these things.. not because it is in XML.

Continue reading "Darkstar Apollo/MXML compiler" »

Posted by JP at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)