My name is Pedro DV. I’m a Software Engineer and Software Designer. I work as a
JavaFX and Swing Freelancer and
Consultant, but more generally can be described as a Front End Freelancer and Consultant
since I also have experience in web technologies, building web apps, etc,
and have experience in
User Interface Design
and User Experience.
I’ve been creating user interfaces, professionally, since 2006. More information here and for a detailed
CV style report my LinkedIn page.
I’ve just released a new update for JMetro, bumping the version up to 3.3.0.
In this update you’ll find:
New TreeView Fluent Design System (‘Metro’) inspired style;
New Tabs and TabPane FDS inspired style;
New Context Menu dark FDS inspired style and retouch of light style.
JMetro version 3.3.0 details
TreeView JMetro style
The following animations show the new TreeView JMetro style:
TreeView JMetro light style
TreeView JMetro dark style
Tabs and TabPane JMetro style
A new JMetro style has been added for Tabs (and TabPane):
Tab JMetro light style
Tab JMetro dark style
ContextMenu dark style and light style update
Before this JMetro version the dark and light style of the Context Menu looked the same:
Context Menu – JMetro theme before version 3.3.0
With version 3.3.0, a dark theme has been added, and the light theme has been retouched, and made slightly more compact:
ContextMenu JMetro light theme
ContextMenu JMetro dark theme
Conclusion
That’s it for this post. 3 new styles have been added/retouched: TreeView, Tabs and ContextMenu. Follow me on twitter and subscribe to this blog if you want to stay up-to-date on the latest news. I’ll update the documentation in the next coming days.
Here’s what I have planned next for JMetro:
Retouch Radio Button style;
Add JMetro style for Menus;
Retouch Toggle Switch style;
Add capability to easily change colors of JMetro style;
Hi again, this time the TableView “Metro” style gets added to the JMetro JavaFX theme. This amps up the JMetro version to 3.1.0.
The reason why I didn’t add the Table style before is because strangely there isn’t yet a definition for the Table in the Fluent Design System (previously Metro). There is a preview control, called DataGrid but is still in preview and will only be officially added later.
The JMetro Table style is a custom made style I’ve done based on the Fluent Design System’s other controls and guide lines.
As usual there is a Dark and Light theme.
JMetro Table View – Light Theme
JMetro Table View – Dark Theme
If you’re familiar with the standard JavaFX theme (Modena) you’ll also notice that the JMetro arrow that appears when sorting a column is different.
The border around the table in the dark and light themes are not part of the control style. It was added to the table in the sample app.
In the light theme there is a light border below the header row that is not visible in the GIF. It is visible in a PNG image:
Table View with the border below the header row
These are the relevant fixes that have been made in version 3.1.0:
Fix toggle switch style showing with rounded corners
[Update: This article has been updated on 21 June, 2018]
This is what I’ll be covering in this post:
I’ll give my personal opinion on why I think JavaFX theme JMetro, is a better option than the aging (more than 5 years old), default, Modena theme;
Show some applications that use JMetro: two NASA apps (!?!?), one I’ve done for a client some time ago, and a really nice-looking app I found on the internet;
JMetro has been updated, I’ll be detailing the new update;
I’ll clear up some things about “Metro” and JMetro.
Metro, JMetro and JMetro like libraries
First, I’d like to clear some things up about “Metro” and JMetro library:
Metro is dead?
It is true that the word “Metro”, as it was used to reference the new Windows user interface is dead, but not the design language itself, in fact, quite the opposite. I’ll explain:
In the release of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft introduced the Metro design language, based on previous work with Zune and Windows Media Center. It was later adopted in Windows 8, which was very criticized for its user experience, but not because of Metro itself, in fact Metro received mostly good feedback. Probably, due to trademark issues with one of Microsoft’s German retail partner companies (“Metro AG”), the name was dropped. The term that Microsoft uses nowadays is “Fluent Design System“ (FDS) – https://fluent.microsoft.com. If you look at FDS you’ll clearly notice it’s an iteration over the original “Metro”.
FDS is a design language that’s in continuous evolution.
I thought about changing the name of the library from JMetro to something similar to Fluent Design System, but I think people still associate Microsoft’s new interface design to the word “Metro”.
“Themes like JMetro, that try to mimic the native look and feel of the platform aren’t a good option because the user will feel a strange feeling that something’s not quite right – the ‘uncanny valley’ of user interfaces”.
This is sometimes the argument to say that themes like JMetro aren’t a good option.
It’s a good point, I might be wrong, but I personally disagree. The thing is Metro or more correctly Fluent Design System, is a set of guidelines that make up the design of the user interface, much like Google’s Material Design, and not a set of rules that can only have one exact outcome. JMetro and other Material Design implementations (there are several out there) may not look 100% like Microsoft’s Windows implementation or Google Android, but if they follow the guidelines and look good they are still nice-looking interfaces with good UX, that feel good to use.
JMetro might not look exactly like the Windows Fluent Design System (FDS), there are even controls in JMetro that don’t exist in the FDS but exist in JavaFX and that I have skinned to try to make them look good with the rest, but I personally feel that this kind of libraries don’t have to be 100% the same as the originals to be a good option. You can look at JMetro as a theme that follows FDS and not one that tries to be an exact copy of the Windows native look and feel.
Another good option is to extend JMetro, retouching some of its aspects to fit your particular needs.
By the way JMetro is an ongoing project and I aim to recreate (hopefully making them better) some of the already existing JMetro controls.
This is another personal opinion: I feel the Javafx official theme, Modena, which was created 5 and a half years ago, served us well, but is starting to show its age. 5 and a half years, without re-touches, is a lot for a user interface. I feel we need to have more modern JavaFX themes like Gerrit Grunwald’s mobile ios theme: https://harmoniccode.blogspot.com/2018/05/time-for-something-newios-fx.html and JMetro, although I’m biased and might not be the best judge of JMetro 🙂
JMetro real app example
Unfortunately, it’s been a while since the last release of JMetro and there are things I want to add that are a long time coming. Due to some personal matters and work, my time has been very limited in the recent past. Now that things have cleared up I’ll try to finish up some ideas I had for JMetro.
By the way in case you don’t know I’m a JavaFX and Swing Freelancer and Consultant or more generally a front end freelancer and consultant, I say that because I have a long experience with those technologies, especially JavaFX, but I like to better classify myself as an overall front end freelancer and consultant since I also have experience with web technologies, building web apps, etc, and knowledge / experience with User Interface Design, User Experience, etc. As a computer engineer I obviously know back end, and other areas of computer science but I prefer and have a greater experience with front end, but anyway back to the point of this post, during this time as a freelancer and consultant I had the opportunity to use some of my open source work with some of my clients, I want to show you how a real JMetro and also FXRibbon app can look like. Generally, I need to keep client’s confidentiality, but for this one project, a big client from the U.S.A., I can reveal some screenshots. There are things I don’t like about it now and would have done differently, to my defense this was done almost 5 years ago:
And, can you believe it, JMetro is used in software used by NASA!?!? Thanks Sean Phillips (@SeanMiPhillips) for letting me know:
And in another app from NASA:
And finally, a very nice application that I found on the internet using JMetro:
JMetro new release details
One of the things that was clearly missing was a way to use JMetro as an external library, like I mentioned before due to personal matters and work I didn’t have the time, before, to take this library to the place where I would have wanted it.
So, this library is now available as a Maven dependency, you can get it from bintray, it will most probably be later available through Maven Central in the usual Jfxtras place:
and you can also download the jar here if you prefer.
To set JMetro as the theme you can now use the JMetro class.
First you call its constructor passing in the desired style: JMetro.Style.DARK or JMetro.Style.LIGHT, then you call applyTheme(…), which receives a Scene or a Parent (base class of Control, Region, etc)
new JMetro(JMetro.Style.LIGHT).applyTheme(root);
Conclusion
In this post I expressed my personal opinion about why I think using themes like JMetro is a better option, why I don’t think the reference to the uncanny valley applies in this case. I’ve also tried to clear up that Microsoft Metro Design isn’t dead. Then I showed a few examples of JMetro applied to real world apps and finally what’s new in this recent release, namely, you can now use JMetro as an external library Jar (I know, shame on me for not making this possible before).
The documentation of JMetro has been updated, as always you can find it here.
I also want to thank Tom Eugelink (@tbeernot) for helping out.
Concerning the near future of JMetro, here’s what I have planned:
New TableView JMetro style
New TreeView JMetro style
Easily change the accent color in CSS by redefining a CSS variable or from code through a method call;
(…)
If you want to stay up on the latest news subscribe to this blog and follow me on twitter @P_Duke.
I’ve added two new controls to FXParallax library. The first and most important one, ParallaxPane, creates the possibility of adding a parallax effect to any Node subclass. The second, AnimatedScrollPane extends ScrollPane by making the scroll animated.
In the FXParallax category you can check out my previous blog posts about this library.
In this post I’m going to describe the mentioned additions to FXParallax.
New version details
ParallaxPane
ParallaxPane is a new control that creates the ability to add a parallax effect to any Node subclass. The API is pretty simple all you have to do is set the Node you’d want to have a parallax effect added to, by calling setContent(Node).
ParallaxPane automatically takes care of what “position” of the clipped content to show depending on the ParallaxPane’s screen position.
The video above shows a demo of the ParallaxPane, two ParallaxPane’s exist in this scene, both containing an ImageView object. As you can see those two ImageView’s have a parallax effect.
These are the images that have been used:
The following code snippet shows an example of how you can define a ParallaxPane, in this case we’re setting an image (through the use of ImageView) as the ParallaxPane’s content:
VBox vBox = new VBox();
ParallaxPane parallaxPane = new ParallaxPane();
String url = ParallaxPaneWithImageTest.class.getResource("small-business.jpg").toExternalForm();
parallaxPane.setContent(new ImageView(url));
vBox.getChildren().add(parallaxPane);
ParallaxPane also has a convenience method that you can use when you simply want to set an Image as its contents. That method is conveniently called setImage, and receives an Image object. You can also use the constructor that receives a Node or the constructor that receives an Image object.
If we wanted to have it defined declaratively, in FXML, it could look like this (using the ParallaxPane convenience constructor with a @NamedArg Image parameter):
Another detail about the previous demo is that it’s using the new AnimatedScrollPane, a regular ScrollPane could also be used but AnimatedScrollPane adds an extra interesting effect by having the scroll be animated. You’ll also notice that modern applications, like for instance Google Chrome, usually scroll their contents through a subtle animation.
AnimatedScrollPane has the same API as ScrollPane, in fact it extends from ScrollPane. The current limitation is that, for now, it’s implemented with only vertical scroll in mind.
In the future there might be a ScrollPane skin that you can use, so you can add animated scroll to a regular ScrollPane.
Setting a different Node as content of ParallaxPane
As I said above, any Node can be set as the content of ParallaxPane, the following demo shows a video with a parallax effect (the second ParallaxPane contains a video), this is achieved by setting a MediaView as the contents of the ParallaxPane.
And the FXML code snippet that declares the ParallaxPane with the video:
These demos are all present in the repository, in the test folder.
Conclusion
ParallaxPane and AnimatedScrollPane have been added to the FXParallax library, the former adds the ability of adding a parallax effect to any Node and the other control adds a nice scrolling animation to a ScrollPane like control.
As usual the jar is available for download and through Maven, for details check the FXParallax documentation page, which has been updated.
