FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!

tl;dr: Follow me on Twitter and check for the latest news on JonathanGiles.net.

JavaFX 1.3 Layout

Building decent-sized applications requires layouts (unless you like pain), and the funny thing about layouts is that they’re tough…..real tough……until you bother to actually understand them. The second funny thing about layouts is that once you do understand them they’re simple and powerful. An added bonus is that your head stops hurting and your curse-words jar becomes considerably less overflowing. Finally, your children/partner/pet/pet-rock will love you more and the world will become a happier, more smiley place. This is the power of understanding layouts.

So, please, if you don’t know how to use the JavaFX layout containers, go and read Amy Fowler’s new blog. It is starting off with a bang, covering what’s new and changed in JavaFX 1.3 – and it’s well worth your time to read it. Keep reading each post until it makes sense. If you go cross-eyed or consider giving up, you’re doing yourself an injustice. Read it again!

For convenience, here’s the links you’ll want to read:

Now, go forth and read! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 31

Another week, and unsurprisingly I have another bunch of links for you folks. Thanks to everyone for blogging your thoughts and what you’re working on – it’s great to hear what everyone is thinking of and doing. As always, feel free to ping me with any links you may have that you think are worth including.

Now – on with the news!

That’s all for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – I’ll catch you all again next week (or sooner if you’re on twitter) – same bat time, same bat channel.

How To Embed Fonts

How To Embed Fonts

I was going through my bug list today and noticed this bug, Document how to embed fonts in FX apps. A quick google search turned up a single forum posting on the subject which just linked back to the root bug (lucky for me I put the solution in the bug report so people weren’t completely stuck). Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any documentation on the subject here at FXExperience.com, so I thought to rectify that with a short post explaining the subject. (more…)

JavaFX links of the week, May 24

A huge amount of JavaFX news and links this week, certainly something for everyone, I hope. As always, I’m keen to hear from you folks with any news or links you think should be included. Either message me on twitter or email me.

That’s that for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – it’s great fun finding and reading what you’re working on. Catch you all next week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 17

A slightly quieter week this week, but in fact there is a heap of very useful, well-considered posts this week. Be sure to check out the links below as there is plenty of useful information!

  • Amy Fowler has blogged about the promotion of the ‘managed’ property from LayoutInfo to Node, and at the same time covers the implication of this move. Well worth reading if you don’t understand what managed / unmanaged nodes are.
  • Tor Norbye has done a very useful blog post discussing pixel considerations in Java / JavaFX. Basically, if you’re wondering why your lines look blurred, this post explains why – and how to fix it. If you’re doing anything in JavaFX, you really should read this post.
  • Rakesh Menon has shown how to use the preview TreeView control we released in 1.3. You should read this as it shows the alternative way of building a tree on-demand. It’s a very nice feature of the TreeView API.
  • Peter Karich has posted a ‘matchstick graph editor‘ on JFXStudio. For others creating fun little apps, in any stage of implementation, please consider posting details about it to JFXStudio – contact me for details.
  • Jim Clarke has ported Jim Weaver’s 3D demo I mentioned last week to work on a TV. You can read all about the porting (basically mapping keys to the remote control), and watch a video, on Jim Weaver’s blog.
  • Johannes Schneider has posted about ‘Closing the gap between Java and JavaFX‘ by making it easier to bind between JavaFX and Java code. He says that this will eventually end up in the JFXtras project.
  • Sten Anderson has released Music Explorer FX 2.0, which has significant improvements over earlier releases.
  • I came across the ‘getting started with the JavaFX Composer‘ tutorial this week, and whilst I don’t know it’s age, I thought it might be useful for people wanting to play with this JavaFX RAD plugin for NetBeans.

That’s us for another week. Thanks to everyone for writing these useful posts, and as always please contact me if you think I missed something or should include a link next week. Keep up the hard work folks! 🙂

Johannes Schneider