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.

Radial Word Clock

Radial Word Clock

by | Oct 5, 2009 | Demo

I had great fun entering the JFXStudio challenge to write a time themed JFX application in less than 30 lines or 3000 characters. Here is my entry a radial clock made of words:

Click to run "Radial Word Clock"

Click to run "Radial Word Clock"

(more…)

JavaFX1.2 Layout – Amy Fowler

JavaFX1.2 Layout – Amy Fowler

by | Sep 17, 2009 | Layout, Links

Amy Fowler the layout guru has written a excelent article on layout in JavaFX 1.2, recomended reading for anyone working with or learning JavaFX.

JavaFX’s powerful scene-graph and animation engine enables gamer types to rapidly create dynamic visual scenes that are functionally expressed through binding and triggers and timelines. On the other, it’s growing controls and charts libraries clearly stake out a more traditional GUI turf. As interfaces finally graduate to the 21st century, the lines between these two worlds is blurring in exciting ways. Our challenge is to evolve the FX platform to support this convergence, which speaks precisely to why layout in JavaFX is complicated enough that it requires a blog series to explain.

-> JavaFX 1.2: Layout

Free icons for your JavaFX applications

Free icons for your JavaFX applications

by | Jul 28, 2009 | UI Design

Icons are a important part of any application so here is a few nice free collections I have come across that you might find helpful. You can add add a icon to a button like this:

Button {
    graphic: ImageView{ image: Image{ url:"{__DIR__}icon.png"}}
}

assuming the icon “icon.png” is in the same directory(package) as your source file.

Developpers Icons by Sekkyumu

(more…)

Caspian Skin

Caspian Skin

by | Jun 13, 2009 | Controls, UI Design

The new JavaFX controls were designed to be easily skinable so that you can create any look you can think up but we still need a default look that you get out of the box. The default skin that comes with JavaFX 1.2 is called Caspian which aims to be flexable and usable as is for a wide range of applications. I thought I would share a little about the design decisions I went through in designing Caspian.

The Requirements

  • Needs to work in many types of applications from product sites though strong branded corporate sites to sparkly web 2.0 sites.
  • Has to fit in and look in place on Windows, Mac, Mobile and TV
  • Must not look identifiably like any other look
  • Should complement the design of a application not over power it

The Technical Requirements

  • Need to be CSS themable so the designer/developer can customize it to fit into their product design
  • Vector based so that the controls look good even when scaled , rotating, animating etc.
  • Needs to be technically simple so that it is fast to render

The Color

  • Has to be gray to fit in with the current fashion and the widest range of products
  • Needs an accent color for important UI parts such as focused items and default buttons on a dialog where the user attention needs to be drawn
  • Has to work on wide range backgrounds

colors

Initial Design

After experimenting with lots of designs and researching what other people are doing in the field here are the initial designs I did in Photoshop.

controls design 1

controls design 2

Example Window Design

Example Window Design

Testing on a extreme range of colors

Testing on a extreme range of colors

Hope you found that interesting the next few blogs on Caspian will cover how to style controls with CSS and how to make custom skins.

Dean Iverson: Creating XYCharts

Dean Iverson: Creating XYCharts

by | Jun 12, 2009 | Charts

Another excellent article on JavaFX charts this time covering the various types of XYCharts.

The remaining five types of charts are all meant to work with XY data. These charts are all subtypes of the XYChart base class…