Hello people, Well, these days I was thinking that I am getting bored of the classic Swing or Windows-like GUIs. OK they are good enough but.... So, does anyone know any tools or links or whatever in the web that will help me build a GUI from the very beggining without using Swing or AWT classes? Tom. P.S.: OK, I am asking too much but I know such a thing can be done...
Ben Wood
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Personally, I would use the swing classes as a basis for my new GUI style by creating a custom look and feel with custom components etc rather than avoiding them. I think it would be a lot of work to start again from scratch. Swing offers good customisation possibilities, you can easily get away from an existing proprietary look and feel by building on the existing components. regards, Ben
SCJP 1.4, www.gsi3d.org.uk
Tom Diamond
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Well, OK I know that building something like that from scratch will be very difficult (especially for me) but what I have in mind is not changing the look and feel (colors, backgrounds and so on) but changing the whole stuff (shape of tabbed panes for example or the way menus are shown). Something similar to what M***soft did to her new experienced applications. The problem is that I have not even the slightest idea how to start this.... Tom.
Ben Wood
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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure what you are after can be done without starting from scratch. Forget changing background colours etc, that's not what I mean. You can actually alter how a component is drawn. So you could, for example, change the design of a tabbed pane or a menu. Now, I have never done this, but I'm (semi-educated) guessing that you can over-ride a components paint() method with your own Graphics object to create a whole new component. As a first thought you might define a class called TomsTabbedPane which implements JTabbedPane, then use the paint()method to re-design it.
No doubt someone far more skilled than I would be a better person to comment on how feasible this approach is, but it might be a starting point? If you get anywhere, let me know! hth Ben.
Tom Diamond
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Ben, I found a couple of links in another thread in this forum. I have not searched them yet but I think that there are many things to find in there... Try www.l2fprod.com,www.javootoo.com. You may also try the original message here. Tom.
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