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Thursday, 13 September 2012

Creating Metro-style UI in Java using Swing

Just time to post a quick update about a project that I'm currently working on. I am quite keen on the new Metro UI being introduced in Windows 8 and was inspired to see if I could implement a similar look-and-feel in some of my Java applications.

It's still very much a work in progress, but I'm slowly beginning to achieve the results I was hoping for. My aim is to build in plug-in functionality, so that widgets may be added and removed dynamically. I also want to implement drag and drop support, including self-rearranging widgets and some basic animation. Once I get that to a stage where it's working and stable, I will think about maybe producing a library or a framework of some kind to make it easier to develop Metro-style applications in the future. Who said that Java GUI's had to look dull?



Thoughts and suggestions are very much welcome. I should point out though that this is just a side project that I'm working on whenever I get some spare time and I can't promise that I will have time to implement all feature requests.