I want to make a transparent overlay for a foreign project to show live video. Sample of overlay is given in the image link below. In image you can see a overlay at right bottom corner showing face of a person, I also want to achieve same functionality using JMF to show face and then display the face in overlay using swing.
Sample Overley Imahe: http://www.ovostudios.com/images/vidsamsolo.jpg
Can someone help achieving this functionality?
If you're just starting the project and haven't actually got the JMF part up and running yet, then you might want to take a look at some alternatives before committing to it.
If you want to go ahead with Swing, to get the general overlay behaviour you want, you'll need to make use of Frame.setUndecorated() to turn off window borders and buttons, and Window.setAlwaysOnTop() to make sure the window stays on top of other windows. For the transparency, see this tutorial. However, I'm not sure whether transparency and video will work nicely together, so good luck!
You might also want to write a custom focus handler for the window so that it cannot be focused, although it is probably impossible for the overlay to be properly 'phantom' whereby clicks just pass through the overlay to the underlying desktop. That kind of behaviour might only be possible by using low-level graphics techniques i.e. by not creating a window at all, but by drawing directly onto the screen. That might require a native library.
Related
I have a paint program written in java with SWT. I am testing with SWTBot. My test case is to draw a picture on the canvas, capture the image of the canvas, and compare to the expected image.
The problem is that I can't find any way to move the mouse using the SWTBot. Apparently it only allows me to click the mouse. I want to
move to an x,y location
mouse down
move to another x,y location
mouse up
Any advice?
I've decided to stop using SWTBot. The functionality is very weak. It is designed for Eclipse apps, so it doesn't really support plain SWT apps very well. Although having direct access to the widgets is somewhat appealing, the requirement of running the test code in the app process is awkward.
I've decided to use Sikuli instead. It has pretty good API for both Java and Python. It seems to have more function and better support than SWTBot.
Is it possible to simply paint() (or use some other function) to the screen in Java? As in draw over everything else on some coordinates of the screen itself, not inside some window.
If not, is it possible to make an invisible window that takes up the entire screen and use its glass pane to do it? Would complications arise from doing this? (Such as not being able to click on other applications)
Are there any other ways?
Thanks.
Edit: I'm not trying to do full screen with this, by the way.
When you paint() in Java, you're painting only within the confines of the size and location of what is being paint()ed.
If you're looking to do full screen stuff, there are tutorials for that:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/extra/fullscreen/index.html
In theory, you can create an transparent undecorated maximized JFrame. This will allow you to "paint" over the desktop. Problems are obvious: if an application stays behind this window, it will not receive any mouse events.
Months ago, I made an evil cheat to draw directly on Windows Explorer's Desktop: mixing some .NET coding with JNI and Sun's internal classes - that's surreal, but works.
I am currently toying with the idea of converting a small/medium sized project from AWT to SWT, although Swing is not totally out of the picture yet.
I was thinking about converting the main window to an SWT_AWT bridge object, but I have no idea how the semantics for this work. After that, I plan to update dialog for dialog, but not necessarily within one release. Is this possible?
Has someone done a conversion like this and can give me some hints? Is there maybe even a tutorial somewhere out there? Is there maybe even a tool that can automate parts of this? I have tried googling, but to no avail.
Update: One additional thing is: Currently, this is a netbeans project. Might be of help or not, I don't know.
We have done this quite a few times. But only because we are going from a Swing application to an Eclipse RCP application not because we like messing with things. This project will really let you know whether you've separated your controller/model code from your view code.
One suggestion is to not try and convert everything all at once. You will end up with a bunch of mixed code that doesn't work at all. You can start at converting portals. I would consider a portal anything within a Tab, Dialog, or Window, essentially self contained unit. If you have a window that opens up, create the Window in SWT, but make it's contents the existing AWT/Swing. This should be fairly straight forward and allow you to get used to the (I really hope they weren't drunk and had a good reason for this) way of instantiating and associating parent/child controls.
One gotcha that can occur is with transparent components. Swing, with the exception of a "window" class is all rendered in Java. This makes it very easy to render things the way you want them. In SWT, there are some restrictions:
Borders. If you use SWT.BORDER you are stuck with whatever color the native component uses. Your best bet is to use a PaintListener and render your own borders if you want them in a different style or color.
Transparent labels, progress bars. I have not been able to get Labels or Progress Bars to have a transparent background. If you want them to take on the parent color, or drawing you will need to render the text and other controls yourself.
Controls. There are composites and controls in SWT. Think of Controls as the basic native controls that do all the native API calls. These cannot be subclassed, which makes things difficult.
Tables will give you the most trouble. Make sure everything is stable before you attempt to convert a JTable to a Table or TableViewer. You will spend some time on these, especially if you have custom editors and viewers.
I have not researched why SWT was designed the way it was. I am guessing there HAD to be a good reason. It would be great if someone had a blog or defense to it's design so I don't have to search for it. Once it's posted I'll remove these lines since they have no relevance to the question.
Addition
I want to add that since you have an existing product I assume works. The best piece of advice I can give you is to never let your code get into a state that it cannot compile and run. If you work on your conversion and whatever you check in always runs and executes (despite the visual differences between SWT/AWT/Swing) you will save yourself many headaches in the long run. The worst thing you can do is try to tackle this all at once and get your code in an unstable state for weeks at a time.
I would suggest importing it into a WindowBuilder project, as WindowBuilder gives you the ability to parse existing code and create a GUI mock-up, then morph components to either SWT or Swing.
If you're thinking of using a mix of SWT and Swing in the same application, this Eclipse Corner Article will be immensely useful.
We are preparing the same step: Swing to SWT/JFace. First we try to determine the bottlenecks: reimplement special components derived from JComponent with SWT/JFace, search for a replacement of JIDE docking (we want to use SWT/JFace, not RCP to avoid too much hassle). The worst thing we already imagine is, that in Swing you could create components and adding it later to the parent. With SWT this is not possible: the parent component must be passed as a reference to the child component's constructor. This will require major refactoring in the Swing application before using SWT.
Frankly, we rate the conversion a very heavy change, because we expect the time where nothing can be compiled as quite long. We try to decrease this time by preparing everything as good as possible, but we'll see how good it will work.
Update from April 6th 2011:
We now refactored our Swing application to always create components with their parent (as in SWT). Our subclasses of JFrame and JDialog got refactored to just have a JDialog instance to make it easier to switch to SWT's Shell. In parallel, we rewrite sophisticated components in SWT.
I can't seem to find anybody who has done or posted something like this; Essentially I want to design my own UI in photoshop and then slice down the images to use it in a Java application. Essentially coding in the PSD file as the GUI. Is this possible? If so, can anybody lead me in the right direction?
I'm not sure what editor to use for this sort of stuff. I am using the Eclipse IDE and I know there is a Visual Editor but, I already have the actual design for every component in a PSD file. All I want to do is to start incorporating this into the application. Thanks.
It depends on how far your design goes. If you simply want to have normal Swing components on top of your image this is easy. Convert your PSD into (for example) PNG, create a custom JPanel subclass that loads the image and overwrite the paintComponent() method to draw the image instead of the normal background. All child components can then be set to be transparent with setOpaque(false). This puts your image into the background and puts the components float on top of it.
If you want to change how individual components look, its a lot more work. You basically need to implement a new Look&Feel for Swing. I wouldn't recommend going that route, unless you really have to, we are talking about weeks of work here, and it requires a lot of testing to really make it work properly on all platforms.
Alternately, there are already tons of custom Look&Feels available, I suggest you take a look at some freely available ones (just google "java look and feel"). Many of them can be customized to some degree (how much depends on the actual implementation, so take a close look at the source/documentation for each of them).
You might want to take a look at NetBeans which has a Swing GUI Builder. You would have to redraw your components there, and then write all the code to process the events. It is sometimes good to start with that, though often times it is less frustrating to lay them out with code by hand as it can difficult to make changes in code and have the builder keep up. There is nothing I know that will let you start from a photoshop image and proceed to building a GUI. Sounds like a good project to make someone rich. :-)
I'm trying to create a java desktop application that holds desktop icons. The app will be a menu/panel that is invisible until you hover your cursor near the top of the screen, at which point the menu full of desktop icons will drop down. To add new icons to the menu one must simply drag icons from the desktop into the menu and they should snap to grid. As I am an intermediate level programmer but I havn't ever done a GUI app before in any language, I was wondering if someone could help me out, both with how to approach the problem and on the packages and methods I should be using. Also, I'm thinking of doing this with NetBeans unless you have any other suggestions.
Thanks,
Andrew
As an alternative to Chad's option, you could also do this by creating a frame and using Java's transparent window capability to make the frame transparent (or translucent, if you want a hint that it's there), and using mouse entered/exited events to return the frame to its normal "solid" opacity.
Personally I'd try this solution just because I'd rather use event-based notification than polling the mouse position, but I expect it's more work than the other alternative.
As to drag and drop, I haven't used it extensively enough in Java to give any solutions, but it's not immediately obvious (from a cursory internet search) of how to handle native desktop drag and drops. I'd suggest starting with some dnd tutorials within an application so that you really understand Java's drag and drop API and capabilities.
You can use java.awt.MouseInfo to get the location of the mouse at any point in time, even if you don't have any windows open.
So, you could start a java program, then in your main loop poll the mouse location. If it's in the 'top', then you can open a window.
You can use the easiest thing to do would be to use JButtons or JLabels with images to represent the desktop icons. Just load the image you want to use and stick that on as a label.
I'd start by going through swing tutorial and writing a few simple GUI programs to get the hang of it.
But the MouseInfo thing is what you need to tell when the mouse is at the top of the screen.