Some people collect Coins, some collect stamps, I collect cool application UI images and Icons images. I have over 3000+ UI images and glossy image icons in my system. It is very difficult to explain what kind of pleasure I get by them, I spend hours browsing through them and coding how to make them animated, visual effects, etc. Most of the time I get inspiration for new UI idea’s. My current hobby is trying to create these effects using JavaFX. Below are a small set of glossy icons I use as my wall paper.
This is how I implemented plant visual effect:
Unfortunately current JavaFX(1.2) version doesn’t support converting a node to Buffered Image. Without this feature, not only it is difficult to make complex visual effects, it is difficult to develop an application like paint brush and photo editing software in JavaFX.
I took the following approach to show the plant grow effect,
1) Create a CubicCurve object.
2) Get all X,Y points on the cubic curve (CurvePath class http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5363171 ).
3) Start a Timeline, and link it to a function, so that everytime timeline changes this function (ex:- addAPoint() ) is called.
4) On each call of this addAPoint() method insert an extra LineTo object into the scene.content.
This will not give a smooth curve effect, as each time it is adding a line between two points, we can’t get an ant-aliasing smooth curve, to make it look smooth, I inserted all lines into group and applied the Gassien Blur effect on the group. This will blur the edges and give the smoothness.
If you need to increase growth speed, insert more lines on each function call.
You can download my complete netbeans source here (Note: There is lot of unnecessary logic in the source).
I am working on Java Swing and Java2d since 2000. When I first heard of JavaFX (that time it was called F3) I was excited, as writing special effects and UI Animation’s is very difficult with pure Java. Once I tried F3 language I got confused, syntax was strange, language was very different from Java.I wished SUN must have taken Groovy and added the Animation and Scenegraph functionality to Groovy.
Now after JavaFX1.2 release, I tried again installing and writing few example apps, writing complex special effects or writing Animation code in JavaFX is very simple. In a very short time I am able to produce complex visual effects which previously took days to create in Java 2D.
I am using Netbeans 6.8 and Inkscape 4.7 for creating Vector images.
Check out the following Animation, My primary interest in creating this Animation is to learn JavaFX Script, I have not optimized it for performance or start up time.
As I am experimenting, there is a lot of unnecessary logic in the source, in my next two blogs, I will write about the plant growing effect and wave effect.
You can click on it and create more plants.
Java Web Start (save this Java webstart JNLP file and run it)
Java Applet
I am currently reading “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richard Dawkins. I consider this is one of the best book I read in my life. I understood Darwin’s theory of Evolution from long back, but the specialty of this book is the style of Richard Dawkin’s explanation of Evolution with proper question’s and clear example’s. The example given by Dawkin’s for the Evolution of ‘Eye’ and the role of Time in the Evolution, and place of Randomness in Evolution are very good.
I still wonder the way great mind’s like Newton, Einstein, Darwin predicted about nature. Science is a great thrill, I thank my friend Pramod (Prof at Michigan) for introducing and explaining me such great wonder’s of the nature.
If you are reading this book, you may like to see the following Java Applet demonstration of Insect evolution.
http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/mirror/biomorph/
Long back (I guess in 2006) I implemented basic UI Widgets using Java AWT. That time I felt SWING was too heavy and something like Thinlet is needed. So I implemented complete widgets in Java using AWT 2D Graphics. That time I also had plan to use these widgets for JNode OS. As Yahoo Geocites are closing I thought to move my code to my own site. Here is a screenshot for my widgets.
KWT Widget's
Click this link to see KWT Widgets in action ( You need Java 1.2 or above). I know that its buggy, I stopped working on it. I don’t feel any need for it.
Today I was playing with Inkscape trying to create Glossy looking Android Icon.
Here is the Android Logo SVG in format
Some Glossy Android’s
SVG file for these Androids.
Sometime back I developed a Flash kind of introduction Java Applet for my website.
You can still find it here. (Please note that you need to have Java 1.5 or above to run this Applet).
For this Applet development I used ‘Timing Framework‘ and Kirill Grouchnikov’s SVG to Java 2D Converter.
I was in hurry, so I didn’t fix all bugs, now I am not in mood to work on old stuff 
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Screen Shots,
Image Gallary
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