The new Alloy Look&Feel was created by the same folks who brought your the Kunstoff ("plastic") L&F. What to say about this? How about: the Alloy look and feel from INCORS GmbH is gorgeous! Creating a great look and feel requires a rare combination of software engineering and visual arts talent. We're thrilled to see them come together so successfully!

You can find the Alloy L&F at: www.incors.com/lookandfeel

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Here's a beautiful application that translates words and phrases from one language to another. JDicationary is LGPL'd software created by Csaba Kertész and can now be extended through plugins by open source developers. Plugin modules are downloaded automatically from the web, and there are some interesting ones on the horizon for synthesizing speach and for the online dictionary database at dict.org

JDictionary is available at: www.jdictionary.info

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I'm proud to say that for the last week or so I've been using a pure Java email/chat/file-sharing client called CryptoHeaven. This isn't just an ordinary "communications" client, there's a big emphasis on security features. Email can be sent encrypted and files and messages can be securely stored on CryptoHeaven's servers and shared with whomever you choose. This app would be impressive if it were only a communications client, however it's really more than that.

Give the free download a spin and don't miss the CryptoHeaven interview with former Secretary of State Al Haig (!) on TV.

You can check out CryptoHeaven at: www.cryptoheaven.com

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The one Swing GUI development task that most developers find difficult is component layout. The simple layout managers, like BorderLayout, are often not general enough, but the general purpose workhorses like GridBagLayout and the BoxLayout classes can be difficult to use. Support for interactively defining layouts using direct manipulation tools or wizards within IDEs does exist however many developers are still looking for something better. Oculus Technologies has created a layout editor that may prove to be the technology that finally fills the gap. The tool is pretty easy to use, it generates straightforward code based on their layout manager, and there's a web started evaluation version. So give it a try and decide for yourself!

You can take a look at OculusLayout here: www.javalayout.com

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Valuatum is a tool for stockbrokers that includes a web started Swing client for valuating companies (called ValuModel). It was written by the eponymous software development firm in Helsinki, Finland.

Esa Mäkeläinen was kind enough to send us a short description which we definitely could have not said better ourselves: "What makes the ValuModel convenient is that the user may change the estimates at many levels, e.g. EBIT and Net Sales estimates at corporate, quartal or at divisional level or with growth rates/margins and thereafter see the effects on key figures and cash flow based valuation. This is because the model has formulas to many directions and not only one estimate path as a normal valuation model on Excel spreadsheet. The graphical userinterface created with Swing hides the 8700 parameters of the model neatly behind a tree structure. ValuModel is a part of bigger entity called Valuatum Platform, which is a platform to stockbrokers for delivering research data to their institutional customers and for bartering data beyond their own coverage with other brokers."

There's a free 30 day evaluation (web started!), so call your broker!

The Valuaturn website is at: www.valuatum.com

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A nice open source text processing application. You might think that SimplyHTML was an HTML editor however the web site says otherwise: " SimplyHTML is not a HTML editor. There are countless of undoubtedly good applications around already. SimplyHTML is a text processing application being based on HTML and CSS files."

You can check out the SimplyHTML at: www.lightdev.com

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Here's a new peer to peer (P2P) collaboration application that's a showcase for Swing and for what's possible using the JXTA support for P2P networking. The Momentum application supports sharing and collaborating on documents and drawings using email, chat, and direct manipulation. And there's no need for a special centralized server - all communication is peer to peer.

Inview Software can be found at: www.inviewsoftware.com

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Phil Herold, who's the Team Lead for Active Studio™ was kind enough to send us some screenshots of this tool from HiddenMind Software.

Active Studio is used to develop and deploy JavaScript "applets" on handheld wireless PDAs (RIM BlackBerry and Pocket PC are supported). Most of the screenshots below show the custom look and feel, "Studio", that the Active Studio folks derived from the standard Swing Windows L&F. There's also a screenshot of the app dressed up in the "modern" skin of SkinLF.

HiddenMind Software can be found at: www.hiddenmind.com/products_studio.html

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LDMS - Lebhafte Diskussionen, Motivierende Stimmung


Bjoern Stenersen was kind enough to send us this description: "LDMS is a document, list distribution, and output management system which can also process extremely large quantities of data and allows for any number of users at distributed locations. LDMS combines intuitive, flexible PC editing with the security and power of the mainframe." He also noted that the previous version of the app was written in C++!

The SI Software website is at: www.si-software.de

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Tanveer Rameez was kind enough to send us this description of JPhotoBrush:

"Here is an Image Manipulation application written entirely in java making extensive use of Swing, Java2D and imaging concepts by the author. It has many features-filters, effects, transformations and drawing tools and user friendly interfaces. Includes a Image browser that supports most common image file types. Effects plugins and Look & Feel plugins can also be added. It is also Java Web start enabled and is a freeware for non-commercial use."

JPhotoBrush can be found at: www.tanveer.freeservers.com/programming/JPhotoBrush.htm

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JNLP: http://www.compiere.org/looks/compiereLooks.jnlp

Jorg Janke from Compiere sent us a pointer to the Compiere look and feel some time ago (OK - six months ago!) and it got lost it our otherwise flawless Swing Sightings email processing system. So here it finally is. Compiere also makes an ERM/CRM system which is consistently one of the top ten most active open source projects on sourceforge.net. We hope to cover that in a future edition of Swing Sightings.

You can check out Compiere Looks at: www.compiere.org

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Moon Task is a simple web started task scheduler written by Antony Ng. If you're a software engineer you've got a long todo list (admit it!), so why not add "try Moon Task" somewhere near the beginning.

You can check out Moon Task at: members.tripod.com/moontask

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SwingML is an open source project whose goal is to create an XML markup language to render in a web browser JFC/Swing based graphical user interfaces. The Swing based SwingML renderer applet is a svelte 119K bytes and markup descriptions for GUI can be quite compact. SwingML is not unlike a commercial product from enode that we featured in Swing Sightings #9.

SwingML is available at: swingml.sourceforge.net

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