I am trying to develop an application in Java (Swing) that lets me overlay a grid on the screen, and be able to click things behind the grid -- say, an icon the desktop for example.
Would I approach this problem with a Transparent JFrame or a Transparent JWindow?
Whatever I use, the transparent window/frame needs to
always be on top.
occupy the entire screen.
register every click with a mouse listener.
record the coordinates of the clicks on the screen.
allow me to use the Graphics class to draw a grid on the screen, and other elements, like numbers or images, that should also be click through.
Any direction would be appreciated.
Apologize if I haven't been specific enough, but I haven't found a demo window or frame that can do all these things. There's an example here and another here -- but I don't know how to use WindowUtils in Eclipse. This is my first time in GUI development and I've never used external libraries aside from the base Java classes.
on top: Frame.setAlwaysOnTop() should work for you
full screen: Setting the window size to the display size will make it occupy the entire screen
events and overlay painting: The actual behavior may vary by platform, but typically if you're using an alpha component to draw into your window, and your window is nominally transparent, those areas not painted (or sometimes those painted below a certain alpha threshold) will pass events through to whatever applications, windows, or components are underneath.
If you capture events, you then have to re-introduce them to whatever window is below yours, which is non-trivial. If you don't capture events, you need to install an OS-specific event handler to capture events of interest.
JNA's WindowUtils.setWindowTransparent() should provide the paint/event behavior required, or you can use the AWTUtils equivalent provided in more recent JVM releases.
Related
I need to create a line graph to allow me to drag it in different coordinate axes, when dragged backward the graph should show data that have already been painted.
"Currently I have some graphs showing real-time data, I receive this data via sockets, then I want to be able to pause the graph and dragging back to see the data that have already been shown."
I'm not experienced with Javafx, so I apologise if this misses the mark.
I have made something similar in the past using my own component and a JScrollPane. You can make a "scrolling savvy" client, allowing you to render the history as the user drags the graph backwards. If you make your client Scrollable, you have full control on how it responds. While this isn't javafx specific, there is a javafx panel, so I can't see a reason this wouldn't work, assuming comparability with light weight swing components.
Oracle introduce it here: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/components/scrollpane.html#scrollable
I am trying to build a Media Player. I have all the code for music playback. And the GUI is made up of 3 main parts:-
A blue background.
A JList with JScrollPane
A JLayer Shell (with a polygon cut out to reveal the list and blue background beneath it.)
So my question is how can I create a custom list or JTable that is slightly rotated with the base of the component stretched out on both corners (using a perspective filter). Also the JScrollbar attached must be customized also. I guess at least it needs to be rotated. But would like to know how to make one by supplying my own graphics. Is this possible?
Here is a MOCKUP of the design:
http://www.splashportal.net/MOCKUP/iJuk-MOCKUP.swf
Here is a Screenshot of it:
You can transform a view component, as shown here, but mouse interaction is effectively impossible without re-writing the UI delegate. Alternatively, you may be able to adapt the approach shown here that uses an inverse transform to effect mouse control.
This program will have an infinite canvas (ie as long as the user scrolls, it becomes bigger) with a tiled background image, and you can drag and drop blocks and draw arrows between blocks. Obviously I won't use a layout manager for placing blocks and lines, since they will be absolutely positioned (any link on this, possibily with a snapping feature?). The problem arises with blocks and lines. Basically I'll have two options:
Using a simple layout for each building block. This is the simplest and clearest approach, but does it scale well when you have hundreds of objects? This may not be uncommon, just imagine a database with 50 tables and dozens of relationships
Drawing everything with primitives (rectangles, bitmaps, etc). This seems too complicated (especially things like text padding and alignment) but may be more scalable if you have a large number of objects. Also there won't be any event handler
Please give me some hints based on your experience. I have never drawn with Java before - well I did something rather basic with PHP and on Android. Here is a simple preview
DISCLAIMER
You are not forced to answer this. I am looking for someone who did something like this before, what's the use of writing I can check an open source project? Do you know how difficult it is to understand someone else's code? I'm talking about implementations details here... Moreover, there is no guarantee that he's right. This project is just for study and will be funny, I don't want to sell it or anything and I don't need your authorization to start it.
Measuring and drawing text isn't such a pain, since java has built in classes for doing that. you may want to take a look at the 2D Text Tutorial for more information. In fact, I did some text drawing computations with a different graphics engine which is much more primitive, and in the end it was rather easy (at least for the single-line drawing, for going multiline see the previous link).
For the infinite canvas problem, that's also something I always wanted to be able to do. A quick search here at stackoverflow gives this which sounds nice, althought I'm not sure I like it. What you can do, is use the way GIMP has a scroll area that can extend as you move - catch the click of the middle mouse button for marking the initial intention to move the viewport. Then, when the mouse is dragged (while the button is clicked) move the viewport of the jscrollpane by the offset between the initial click and the current position. If we moved outside the bounds of the canvas, then you should simply enlarge the canvas.
In case you are still afraid of some of the manual drawing, you can actually have a JPanel as your canvas, with a fixed layout. Then you can override it's paint method for drawing the connectors, while having child components (such as buttongs and text areas) for other interaction (and each component may override it's own paint method in case it wants to have a custom-painted rect).
In my last drawing test in java, I made an application for drawing bezier curves (which are basically curves made of several control points). It was a JPanel with overidden paint method that drew the curve itself, and buttons with custom painting placed on the location of the control points. Clicking on the control point actually was clicking on a button, so it was easy to detect the matching control point (since each button had one control point associated with it). This is bad in terms of efficiency (manual hit detection may be faster) but it was easy in terms of programming.
Anyway, This idea can be extended by having one child JPanel for each class rectangle - this will provide easy click detection and custom painting, while the parent will draw the connectors.
So in short - go for nested JPanels with custom drawing, so that you can also place "on-canvas" widgets (and use real swing widgets such as text labels to do some ready drawing) while also having custom drawing (by overriding the paint method of the panels). Note that the con of this method is that some swing look-and-feel's may interfere with your drawing, so may need to mess a bit with that (as far as I remember, the metal and nimbus look-and-feel's were ok, and they are both cross-platform).
I am looking for ways to zoom in a Java Swing application. That means that I would like to resize all components in a given JPanel by a given factor as if I would take an screenshot of the UI and just applied an "Image scale" operation. The font size as well as the size of checkboxes, textboxes, cursors etc. has to be adjusted.
It is possible to scale a component by applying transforms to a graphics object:
protected Graphics getComponentGraphics(Graphics g) {
Graphics2D g2d=(Graphics2D)g;
g2d.scale(2, 2);
return super.getComponentGraphics(g2d);
}
That works as long as you don't care about self-updating components. If you have a textbox in your application this approach ceases to work since the textbox updates itself every second to show the (blinking) cursor. And since it doesn't use the modified graphics object this time the component appears at the old location. Is there a possibility to change a components graphics object permanently? There is also a problem with the mouse click event handlers.
The other possibility would be to resize all child components of the JPanel (setPreferredSize) to a new size. That doesn't work for checkboxes since the displayed picture of the checkbox doesn't change its size.
I also thought of programming my own layout manager but I don't think that this will work since layout managers only change the position (and size) of objects but are not able to zoom into checkboxes (see previous paragraph). Or am I wrong with this hypothesis?
Do you have any ideas how one could achieve a zoomable Swing GUI without programming custom components? I looked for rotatable user interfaces because the problem seems familiar but I also didn't find any satisfying solution to this problem.
Thanks for your help,
Chris
You could give a try to the JXLayer library.
There are several tools in it, which could help you to make a zoom. Check the examples shown here. I would recommend you to read more about the TransformUI, from this library. From the example, it seems like it could help solving your problem.
Scaling the view is easy enough; transforming mouse coordinates is only slightly more difficult. Here's an elementary example. I'd keep JComponents out, although it might make sense to develop an analogous ScaledComponent that knows about the geometry. That's where #Gnoupi's suggestion of using a library comes in.
hey you can try this if you want to zoom a image like any other image viewer the use a JPanel draw an image using drawImage() method now create a button and when you click the button increase the size of the panel on the frame it appears as if the image is being viewed in Zoom
You might find Piccolo2D.java API useful: http://code.google.com/p/piccolo2d/
It is very simple.
It touts in particular its smooth zooming. You essentially make a "canvas" that can contain various elements, and can then zoom by just holding right-click and panning the mouse back and forth.
I worked on a team that used it to create this: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/guitar/index.php?title=WebGuitar#EFG.2FGUI_Visualizer
The nodes you see there are clickable links themselves.
Since Java 9, there are VM arguments (actually meant to be used for high dpi scaling) that can render a application with a higher scaling factor:
java -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0 -jar MyApplication.jar
Or:
java -Dsun.java2d.win.uiScaleX=2.0 -Dsun.java2d.win.uiScaleY=2.0 -jar MyApplication.jar
I know how to draw a rectangle onto a JPanel, but how can I paint a rectangle to the screen so that the rectangle appears to be floating? More specifically, a non-filled rectangle. My thought is to use a transparent JFrame with a rectangle drawn on it; however, this makes all of the content in the JFrame transparent.
My Solution
So I think there are many ways of going about this, some more complex than others, some more practical than others.
I tried the splash screen. The problem with that is you need to pass VM parameters "-splash " when you run. I created a manifest file to automate this/put the parameters into eclipse; but then the code is dependent on the .gif file and I can't change the size/position of the rectangle easily. Similar problems occur while faking it via screen screenshot. Good suggestions though, I learned some pretty cool stuff.
So, back to what I did. I used a JFrame, got the content pane and set the background to red (what ever color you want), then set the frame undecorated which removes the titlebar and border of the window. This created a floating rectangle which I could easily change the size and location of (frame.setSize, .setLocation). I have yet to make this a non filled rectangle, I tried internal frames and layeredpanes, but no success.
JFrame is a heavyweight component, and those were always opaque for the longest time. However, since Java 6u10, there is an inofficial API for transparent windows in the class com.sun.awt.AWTUtilities, which will most likely become official in Java 7. In earlier versions, the only way to simulate this kind of thing was to fake it via screenshots taken with java.awt.Robot
You would probably have to have parts of the window transparent while the actual drawn rectangle is not. I doubt there is a platform-agnostic solution for this so you would need to resort to JNI for this. Depending on what you need to do it might also be nice to make the window invisible for clicks which would need other tricks as well.
https://github.com/twall/jna/
That project offers a library and has examples of a clock and info balloons that are semi-transparent and transcend even what you're trying to do. The demos work well on Windows but I couldn't speak to how cross platform they are.
You might want to look at JLayeredPane. The demo on this page shows partially what you want, however when painting your rectangle you'll need to set your paint to transparent:
AlphaComposite ac = AlphaComposite.getInstance(AlphaComposite.SRC_OVER, 0.5f);
g2d.setComposite(ac);
g2d.drawImage(image, x, y, this);