And once you are able to layout things in a circle... Besides the CornerMenu described in the previous post, another incarnation of CircularPane is the CirclePopupMenu. It, as the name…

A few months back I had the pleasure of attending the multidevice presentation by Gerrit Grunwald (@hansolo_). In this presentation he demonstrated how easy it was to port a single JavaFX code base to several devices, including Android, iOS, RasberryPi, and a few more. One of the UI elements he showed on each device was a corner menu; circular icons appearing from the corner of a window. This was visually a great UI component, and Gerrit told me it was part of his Enzo library. The Enzo library is full of such visually appealing JavaFX controls and components, and freely available to everyone who wants to use them, but it is also the case that Enzo mainly exists to support Gerrit in his presentations and demonstrations. And there is a difference between a control intended for public use and one that is a result of a demonstration. So when I asked Gerrit if I could take his control and move it over to JFXtras, he agreed immediately.

The first order of business was to layout stuff in a 90 degree arc. And I could have just copied Gerrit’s code, but as things go in a hobby project I decided that this should be something reusable, so CircularPane was born.

It took some time to get it working correctly; creating a general purpose pane for laying out stuff in a circle dynamically is not as trivial as it seems. But after a few weeks it got to the point where CircularPane was mature enough, a demo was available, and it was unit tested. After that, work could finally start on one of the primary things it was created for: CornerMenu. (Although the fact that a round shaped Android watch will come out soon, may turn out to be a nice coincidence.)

So CornerMenu is exactly what it says: a menu that is located in any of the four corners of a window. The menu can be static, but usually it will show the items when the mouse comes close to the corner, like so:

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JFXtras has a TimePicker that uses a number of Sliders to represent hours, minutes and seconds. And even though this is functionally an OK user interface, it is visually not very appealing.

Recently I upgraded to a new phone and ran into this Android TimePicker, which I liked better than my slider UI. So I figured I would try and create something similar.

The first thing that is needed to create a UI like this, is to layout nodes in a circle. That turned out not to be too difficult, but the implementation was very specific for the circular time picker I was working on. And I figured it would be nice if the circular layout was reusable, so I got side-tracked in creating CircularPane. (more…)

When you’re in the custom control business, you need hooks into the main framework to get the controls supported well. One of the features of JavaFX is the FXML UI notation format, it allows the coder to define (parts of) a scene with more ease and readability. FXML already is a pretty flexible and open technology, using reflection and the Java Bean standard (aka setters and getters) to try and automatically setup a control according to the values in the FXML file. But there are always situations that don’t fit.

One of those situation is the JFXtras CalendarTextField control and then specifically the date format properties. In the Java API these properties take instances of DateFormat, either a single one, or even a whole list. FXML at the moment does not know how to convert a string to DateFormat. So the dateFormat and dateFormats attributes below result in errors.

<?import javafx.scene.control.*>
<?import javafx.scene.layout.*?>
<?import jfxtras.labs.scene.control.*?>

<VBox xmlns:fx="http://javafx.com/fxml">
    <children>
        <CalendarTextField dateFormat="yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" dateFormats="yyyy-MM-dd, yyyy-MM, yyyy"/>
    </children>
</VBox>

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Probably everyone is exited that Oracle is finally picking up the highly dubious date time implementation in Java called Calendar. It is interesting to see that large companies like Sun really have problems getting something as seemingly simple as date and time implemented correctly. Of course there are two sides to the problem, first there are all the intricacies of date and time, like time zones and other more or less subtle problems (this is where Date went wrong). And secondly there is the implementation aspect, where for 99% of the usages a date or time is considered an immutable value, like a number, easy to use for a developer (this is where Calendar went wrong, just take a look at the output of toString()).

Now, there are reasons why there is a CalendarPicker and not a DatePicker in JFXtras. And the primary reason is that Calendar has a notion of locality, which Date has not; for example in Germany the week starts on a different day (Monday) than in the USA (Sunday).

Calendar actually is pretty decent when it comes to the domain of dates and times, Jodatime is added to Java 8 is because the implementation, the API, is bad. (more…)