A Java™ developer who is used to developing GUIs with Swing and who is now trying to get into Android might be surprised: Java is not the same on Android.
The fact that Java is different on Android has been discussed in some blogs on the net already, so I just sum it up to this: Android applications can be written by any developer who knows the Java programming language. But the number of available runtime classes on Android is different: there are fewer classes in Android regarding package java.* compared to Sun Java Standard or Micro Edition. The most surprising fact for a Java GUI developer might be that there is no Swing on Android.
This article demonstrates some aspects of how a simple Java Swing application with a nice Look and Feel was transferred to Android. The main focus is set on how to write the application with the Android SDK and the styling and theming abilities of Android.
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More and more operating systems use a border resembling frosted glass for their windows, like, e.g., the Aero Glass® decoration known from Windows Vista® and Windows 7®. Providing this ’special effect’ on the Java™ platform is still not easy to realize. Most Look and Feels use opaque borders, which do not visually match the surrounding designs of these operating systems.
This article describes a pragmatic approach to solve to this problem.
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In the previous part I took a closer look at how and to what extent Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Flex Builder offer pixel-graphics and vector-graphics tools to enable GUI designers to create modern user interfaces. In addition I outlined the concept of 9-Slice-Scaling, a method to make pixel graphics scalable without any quality loss. In this last part of the series I’m going to give a short example of how the concept is implemented in both tools and finally provide an overall comparison of the two tools to point out their strengths and weaknesses.
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