Tips & Tricks

Motivation I have been coding JavaFX applications and libraries since 2013 and one thing they all had in common was that I needed to find good icons / graphics that I could use for them. As a former Swing developer I started by using image files, GIFs or PNGs. Normally I would license a library like the "O-Collection" from IconExperience (www.incors.com). But soon it became apparent to me that using image files is too painful. Just imagine for a moment that you want to support different pseudo states of your nodes (e.g. "hover", "pressed", "focused"). You end up with [...]

Selection Strip I recently had to implement a custom control that lets the user select a single item out of a list of items. This "SelectionStrip" control had to lay out the items horizontally and in case of too many items allow the user to scroll horizontally left and right. The control was to be used in a space-constrained area, so the buttons for scrolling should only appear when needed. They also should not waste any additional space when showing. So I decided to place them on top of the control on the left and right sides. All of [...]

In one of my projects I recently noticed that it was hard for the user to see whether the content of a ScrollPane instance was currently scrolled or not. One way of making this more clear is to add a drop shadow to the top of the scroll pane. This is also something suggested by Google's Material Design. So I gave it a try. In my solution I simply added a region to the ScrollPane and when laying it out I am moving it out of the viewport bounds of the ScrollPane so that only the shadow effect applied [...]

Back in the days when I was still implementing UIs in Swing I used to be a big fan of MigLayout ("one layout manager to rule them all", right Mikael?). One of the features I really liked was the possibility to define different behaviors when a component became invisible. MigLayout allowed me to either preserve the space that the now invisible component occupied or to make it available for the still visible components. So how can I do this in JavaFX? Even though the answer is quite simple it is not obvious by looking at the API. JavaFX uses [...]

When I look at the list views on my mobile phone I always notice that they display their scrollbar (normally a vertical one) very differently than JavaFX does. The same is true for applications running on MacOS X. Below you can see a snapshot of Apple's calendar app. You will notice that the scrollbar is actually on top of the content. In JavaFX the scrollbar would be placed to the right of the view. However on mobile devices in order to save space the scrollbar shows up on top of the content. So obviously I wanted to see how [...]

I am a big fan of IntelliJ IDEA and use it every day for the various projects I work on. One thing I like a lot is the dark theme called "Darcula". I like it because it looks cool and because of the low contrast it is better for my eyes. When you stare at something for at least eight hours a day for decades (yes, I am that old) then you better make sure it goes easy on your eyes. This said I obviously also like to use dark themes for my own creations. The following snapshot shows [...]