Daniel Weck left a few comments with good suggestions on how to make the “notification” messages look even better. He suggested making the background darker (not so translucent), and including a drop shadow for the text to make it more readable. What was great is that he even included a link to an example screenshot that showed what he meant. 
After taking a look at the screenshot I decided to take a few minutes and implement his ideas. Additionally, I decided to incorporate another effect that I liked from the screenshot, which was the Mac OS X style curve in the notification area. Here is a screenshot of my quick initial effort:
I’m still not 100% happy with the “drop shadow” of the text but it’s good enough for now. I might go back later and re-implement the shadow using a Gaussian Blur, but I think the results of this “quick hack” are good enough (and close enough to my goal) that I can release it in it’s unfinished state.
Here are the links to download the source code or to run the example with WebStart:
June 13th, 2005 at 9:35 am
Well done !
Thumbs up this quick response to RFE !
The effect looks great.
Nevertheless, it is extremely slow on my Mac (Java 1.4.x not 1.5).
(it used to be ultra-responsive before the update)
I think it’s due to a fade-in/out effect ? Am I right ?
In my opinion, the text shadow is good as it is.
If you feel like playing with Gaussian Blur, I would rather suggest to implement a shadow for the black glossy surface (projected onto the background text editor).
Last point: I get a thin black border around it, is that normal ? (it seems to dissapear when the window position changes).
Thank you for your experimentations !
Daniel WECK
http://del.icio.us/daniel.weck
http://jroller.com/page/danielweck
June 13th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
I know for sure there are a few optimizations that could be done to make it run faster (on any computer).
Normally I test everything on my Mac, but I didn’t get a chance to do it before I posted it to my blog. I’m traveling all this week and I only have my Windows laptop with me, so I’ll test it on the Mac when I get back home.
June 13th, 2005 at 4:48 pm
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June 14th, 2005 at 3:20 am
Hi Jon,
WOW… your sample is looking very very cool. I’m looking forward to an optimized version of the GlassPane, and please keep that UI stuff coming because I’m learning a lot with regards to Swing and UI by reading your blog. I especially liked the “JTabbedPane delegates” examples.
Regards,
j3ns
June 19th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Hi Jon,
This example is really nice.
Regards
Anubhav
June 22nd, 2005 at 4:35 pm
Found you through sitepoint. Great post, awesome blog… Can’t wait to read more! Keep the Swing stuff comin’
July 26th, 2005 at 7:37 am
Nice work, I code a custom class of GlassPane to my GPL project. See the result :
[img]http://analysesi.free.fr/img/analysesi1.png[/img]