When developers try to sell the switch from Swing to JavaFX to their superiors they often say that the user interfaces will look better and more modern. However, to really deliver on this promise I believe that one can not just rely on the improved look and feel of the built-in controls of JavaFX but that some extra effort has to be made to make the UI really stand out and to make everyone say “yeah, this is really an improvement”.

One of the things that can be done to spice up the UI is to animate some of its elements, e.g. fade in / out, slide in / out.

In CalendarFX one of the places where I use animation is the red horizontal line that marks the current time.

Bildschirmfoto 2015-06-19 um 19.02.43

This line is only shown when the user is looking at the current day (“today”). So the line’s visibility has to be tog