For the last couple of months I had the pleasure of working with JavaFX 8 in order to implement a sophisticated user interface for a planning and scheduling application. One of the features needed was a way to perform “in-place” editing, meaning a way to quickly edit some basic attributes of a user selected object.

Following the principle “if you can’t innovate, imitate” I took a look at how Apple is doing these kinds of things and surely enough iCal showed me everything I needed to know.

iCal – The Role Model

In iCal, when the user double clicks on an event, the following “pop over” appears.

ical-1

At this point in time the pop over shows summaries of the various setting groups. The first group covers anything related to the event time, alarm settings, all-day