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This is a very short article with a little hands-on demo of how the different AlphaComposite types interact.

This doesn't necessarily teach anything or present new ideas; it's just a quick applet to consult if you need it.

Take a JSlider. Add a AngleSliderUI. Voila! You have a GUI widget for angles.

Comes in Aqua and non-Aqua flavors.

Sure the buttons in Apple's Tech Note 2196 are great, but they're so... black-box-ish. And they're only available on Macs.

This article sets up a new framework for ButtonUIs, and provides around 10 UI's to choose from. (But you can make more if you want to...)

This is a Photoshop-style color choosing dialog.

You can pull some parts of it apart for customization, but out-of-the-box it offers a great interface if you're dealing with a power user.

Of course: all dialogs are at least slightly evil, and they should be used with care...

This is an isolated GUI component from this article.

This app shows the progression of several different concepts for ColorPalettes. (Hopefully each one is an improvement over the previous?)

This jar includes all my color-related GUI components: the ColorPicker, the ColorWell, and the ColorPalette.

I'm not going to argue that this will meet your needs and save the world; but it includes a lot of useful tools and it might help (save the world).

As far as I can tell: there's not a good (efficient) way to crossfade two translucent images in Java2D.

(Crossfading opaque images? That's easy. But not translucent ones.)

This article focuses on discussion and not a downloadable end result.

In lots of Apple's software there's a handy menu option called "Customize Toolbar" that lets users drag and drop components in a toolbar. It's functional and great eye candy.

This article presents a similar mechanism for Java. A single thumbnail doesn't do justice to this feature, but if you go to the article you'll see a screencast.

This is a little toy I made a while ago that really adds a lot of pizazz to a JPanel.

You might argue it adds too much pizazz, and so it should be used sparingly. :) But on occasion it has definitely come in handy. The thumbnail doesn't do it justice, though...

What can you do when your event dispatch thread is blocked?

For starters: this article mentions how to automatically detect this situation and get great console output to help pinpoint the problem. Also this delves into a very murky partial solution. (It has worked multiple times for me, but it uses unsafe deprecated black magic.)

This class uses a java.awt.TexturePaint to render a multiple-color linear gradient.

This was mostly an experiment I put together for this article. As of this writing I'd only recommend using this if you can't use the MultipleGradientPaint in Java 1.6 or its earlier incarnations in the batik project.

This is functional, though. And if you're stuck in an earlier Java version: it's a very small class to add if you need it.

This is a concise GUI component to arrange the distribution of colors for complex gradients.

(By default it also leans heavily on some existing color GUI widgets I wrote, but you can replace those with your own components if you want to.)

This is a handy little gradient that resembles halftone print.

I came across this idea by accident while working on the TransformedTexturePaint class.

It turns out some Graphics2D operations are painfully inefficient -- and we can easily intercept and divert those methods!

This is becoming less of a problem now that Quartz is being phased out, but even without Quartz we can still make some improvements...

This has been a real life-saver when I'm trying to debug our graphics-rich desktop apps at work.

I prewire it so pressing F4 serializes the foremost window, and then whenever something isn't rendering right I can see where each graphic instruction is being called from.

This is a refresher on how to get at NSImages on Mac 10.5.

Also: if you're like me you have no idea what images are out there to be accessed. :) This article also provides a table of the images we have at our disposal, as well as a few comments about some of them.

This provides an efficient mechanism for creating BMP thumbnails, and a crude BMP decoder/encoder.

There used to be a way to completely ruin your graphics performance.

This problem can still occur on Mac if you're use the Quartz rendering engine, but more and more that is being phased out so this is less of a problem than it used to be.

This demonstrates a class that extracts thumbnail information out of a JPEG.

ImageIO can do this: but only if you already have JAI installed on your machine.

This improves the image quality and memory allocation when scaling large BufferedImages to thumbnails.

Need to scale megapixel JPEGs on-the-fly without loading them entirely into memory? This might just do the trick.

I never did trust MediaTracker. Why does it require a java.awt.Component to tell if an image is loaded?

Here I wrote my own class that converts abstract java.awt.Images into BufferedImages.

We needed to display modal dialogs in full-screen mode. On Mac this proved to be in impossible using normal JDialogs, so we had to come up with an alternative solution.

I find the JOptionPane hard to work with sometimes. If you want a really polished dialog -- with a help button, the right spacing, the right controls to escape, etc. -- you might just want to make a new model.

Really: check out the javadocs for this one. There's a lot of research/explanation in there.

If I used an ant script or Eclipse's built-in jar-exporting widget: I'd need to specify up front the classes I want to put into a jar.

This class uses the javac command to figure that out for me.

This article examines the notion of a well-designed inspector.

It uses this interface to layout the components, and it presents a few implementations of that interface (with varying degrees of success/hackery).

I've used the Equations class for a long time now. (Especially in the TransformUtils class.)

But recently I needed something more. I ended up making this class to add a light GUI to interface with the Equations class.

This is a very minimal, no-frills app. But it can solve equations for you that might otherwise make your head hurt. :)

The java.lang.Math class was designed with accuracy in mind.

But if you're dealing with graphics: you can probably fudge on some accuracy in exchange for speed. What methods can be improved?

This triggers mouseClicked events even if the mouse moves a few pixels between click and release.

This article presents a class that can write a .mov file as a series of images and PCM audio.

This movie uses a combination of JPG/PNG and WAV encoding, which is very poor compression. But this format is not subject to nasty patent/royalty issues.

Can we improve on the java.awt.PixelGrabber?

If you're only working with a BufferedImage and not an abstract Image: you might be able to really improve performance with the ARGBPixelGrabber.

This emulates two types of preferences on Mac: several rows of preferences (like the System Preferences) or one row of preferences (like Mail, Safari, etc.).

This introduces an object to lay out several graphic objects on a sheet of paper, and a dialog to preview and edit this layout.

(Oh: and it prints.)

This introduces a new UI for JProgressBars. It comes in 2 flavors: Mac-like and generic.

They're vector-based, so while they're originally designed to be less than 20x20 pixels: they scale well if you need them to.

This iterates over each frame an a QuickTime movie. Each frame is returned as a BufferedImage, and you can see how long each frame is supposed to be.

Note that this uses QuickTime for Java, which is now officially deprecated.

This demonstrates how to interface with QuickTime for Java and grab pixel data from a QDGraphics and render that in a JComponent

QuickTime for Java is now deprecated, though, so I don't recommend starting any new projects with this information...

This lets your browse your UIManager's constants.

... and your SystemColors. And your System.getProperties().

The Robot class can capture parts of your screen as an image, but it can be slow to process so many pixels. This article ties into the RepaintManager to only capture the areas of interest.

Also this jar can export this animation as a MOV file (using JPEG moving encoding). All 100% Java.

This article explores a GUI that manipulates a shape with bezier shape segments.

How do you get the bounds of a shape? A GeneralPath may return a much larger rectangle than necessary. An Area will be accurate, but they're always so slow to work with!

This article explains (and presents) code to calculate shape bounds yourself.

What's the most common shape we need to clip to? A Rectangle.

But if we use Areas our performance will tank. This demonstrates a simple model that iterates over a path exactly once to get the clipped shape.

(This does not use Sutherland-Hodgman clipping algorithm or the Weiler-Atherton clipping algorithm.)

This project branches off the Area class and optimizes parts of its performance. The underlying algorithms are not changed, but (in some cases) the performance is considerably improved.

This breaks a path with cubic curves into several small quadratic curves.

You lose a little precision: but if (for whatever reason) you want quadratic curves: here you go!

If the user drags the mouse over a JComponent, then you can collect a series of points. This project takes those points and replaces the line segments with attractive bezier curves.

An uninteresting but very useful class that deals with measuring shapes.

This is a two-fold article:

• This presents the ParametricPathIterator to convert parametric equations into java.awt.Shapes.
• As a proof of concept: this presents the Spiral2D.

This covers some nitty gritty details about java.awt.Shapes that I refer to (or take for granted) in other shape-related articles.

There is nothing to download here. Just read the article if you're interested.

A fun set of transitions defined with a simple vector-graphics-ish architecture.

The demo includes a player and minimal Flash export.

A stroke based on splattering lots of tiny shapes along a path.

A stroke based on rendering several smaller strokes in parallel along a path.

A stroke that resembles a nib at a fixed angle.

A stroke with grooves in the edges that resembles charcoal on pavement.

This stroke is actually a filter than can modify any shape, but the only current suitable examples are BasicStrokes and CalligraphyStrokes.

Create some fun text effects using block shadows.

This article has 2 goals:

• Display a gray prompt over a JTextField if it doesn't have the focus.
• Implement a RoundTextFieldUI (with an optional magnifying glass).

This discusses different GUIs for the user to search for a string in a JTextComponent.

This includes the common search dialog, the model Safari uses and the model Firefox uses.

This animation idly skims over a series of text boxes by panning and zooming at interesting angles.

This walks through how to find the preferred height of a block of text, and provides a GUI component to display text with a fixed width.

This discusses/demos a class that combines these two elements.

This applies some basic Transition2D's to a JTabbedPane when you change tabs.

This article discusses and emulates the "Window" menu found on Macs.

Sometimes you want to be able to click and drag a window, palette, dialog etc.