Develop Reference

Is it possible to have a transparent JavaFX window with decoration(minimise, maximize, close)

I know in java-fx to make the window transparent, you need to set the stage style as stage.initStyle(StageStyle.TRANSPARENT);. However this will also remove any stage decorations so this does not solve my problem.
The reason I need this is because my application will need to use stage.setAlwaysOnTop(); at certain points, but this feature is not well supported on the target system (centOS). The application also requires stage.setIconnified();, but this does not work if the stage is undecorated.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks

The short answer would be "no, you can't" ... because the minimize/maximize/close buttons are part of the decoration. No decoration - no buttons. It would be a contradiction in itself.
If you need the functionality of those buttons, you would have to create your own buttons as a part of your UI and emulate the behaviour of the decoration buttons. That's what many apps do that come with no default decoration.
Anyway, if you want to manipulate the window behaviour in this way (stay-on-top/iconify, etc.) you always need to take the underlying operating system into account. Any apps (not only Java apps) are only allowed to interfere with window management as far as the OS windowing system allows them to do so.
For example, in various MS Windows versions, the OS behaviour changed several times at this point.

"Home Screen" like effect while switching between views on Android

I'm creating an application on android similar to that of a book. I would simply like to have the scrolling effect between views (not activities) similar to that of the home screen. Currently I am using a ViewFlipper and don't have the animation I would like, since the shift is sudden as opposed to following your finger.
I am aware that there are several opensource projects and classes being developed to achieve such a thing more easily for the individual programmer, but wondered if there was a way I may have overlooked to implement a homescreen-esque effect. An alternative which I have thought of using would be a TabView, with no label tabs being displayed above the content of the page, yet have not heavily looked into this option yet.
If anyone has encountered the same hurdle and has any ideas of how to overcome it, I will buy you a pizza! (Not really... I don't know your address) But I'd be very appreciative! :)
Thanks

I think you're looking for the ViewPager. It's part of the compatibility library.

Cross platform UI spacing/padding

I have written a Java UI using the SWT UI library and the MigLayout layout library.
This page shows screenshots of the UI on Windows, Linux and OSX: http://mchr3k.github.com/org.intrace/screenshots.html
On Linux and OSX my UI has a lot more padding and spacing which I feel wastes a lot of screen space. Is this normal for these platforms? If not, what is the best way to work around this?
EDIT: the linked screenshots have now been updated and no longer show an extra gap on OSX as I have explicitly set the margins on some of my UI elements to 0. The OSX UI is still quite spaced out but I assume that this is correct for the platform.

This is Mikael Grev, the creator of MigLayout.
As someone else mentioned this is a feature of MigLayout. Instead of using x number of pixels (you can of course use that too) by default it is using gaps like related, unrelated and paragraph. These correspond to different sizes in different UI toolkits. For instance on OS X the recommended white space between components is larger than on Windows.
So, yes, this is how it's supposed to look and it will look correct for a native OS X user.
You do seem to have too much white space at the bottom of the Output pane though, in both OS X and Windows.
You can use the PlatformDefaults class in MigLayout to either force a platform or to change the default gaps. Check the source code if you want to know what's happening behind the scenes.
And remember, this is a feature so that every developer won't have to keep track of how to spacing should look like on different platforms, which is kind of hard.
Cheers,
Mikael

That's actually a feature of MigLayout, if I recall correctly. If you don't want this I am sure you could so configure MigLayout. Otherwise, you could use a different layout manager (but I still highly recommend a table-based one) which uses constant spacing for all platforms (such as my MatrixLayout).

Adding a contribution to the windows task bar in java - similar to laptop battery widgets

I am trying to make a contribution to the windows task bar so when i minimize my app it docks itself into the windows task bar , the best way of describing this is by looking at a picture I have drawn:
If anybody knows if this is possible or how to do it please let me know.
I am well aware of the ability to add an icon to the system tray - but this is slightly different.
Thanks in advance,
Andy

You should probably have to use JNI or JNA to achieve this - wrapping the native windows API seems like the most viable idea. It'll greatly diminish the value of using Java, however - using JNI/JNA should always be considered last resort...

Take a look at SWT. This will definitely be a platform specific solution but I am assuming this isn't an issue for you.
SWT (Beginning with 3.6 which just went gold) has a TaskBar class and corresponding TaskItem classes for each item in the TaskBar. I don't think the TaskItem class is going to be powerful enough to do what you are asking for, but by looking at the source it will provide you insight into the low level Windows calls that you can access to get this done.
The SWT version for Windows will have a low level platform specific API that should get you where you want to go. Basically they have done all the JNA/JNI work for you. I am not a Windows programmer so I can't give you more details, but hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

You just need to use the System Tray functionality available in Java 6.
If you look at the More Information section at the bottom of that page it has links to the System Tray API and an example project.

Could you hide your application on minimize and then add an icon for it to the system tray that, when clicked, unhides your application?

Cross Platform Button Ordering in Java and Swing

I'm creating a cross platform application using Swing and Netbeans (Group Layout). Is there a trick I am missing to help develop dialogs with say OK, Cancel buttons in the correct order for different platforms - specifically Windows (OK-Cancel) and Mac (Cancel-OK), rather like the JOptionPane does? I can derive my own class from JDialog with two buttons on it, and swap text and actions around - I just wondered if there is something 'out of the box' I've missed. (This is not a question about which way round buttons should be, or the use of verbs e.g. Save instead of Ok.)

MiGLayout supports this out of the box. Either use this layout manager, or look how it does its magic.

Eclipse SWT also provides platform-aware layouts.