Visual Effects

Cezanne makes your existing application
Look & Feel just stunning

The Cezanne Look & Feel allows visual designers to make the most of their skills, as it allows turning sophisticated artwork into attractive Java™ Swing components. Be prepared for visual effects that by far exceed the expectations of Java™-accustomed folks and create engaging Swing applications that can finally compete with modern Rich Internet Applications (RIA) GUI technologies in terms of quality.

Unprecedented visual effects in Java™

Java™ Swing is not exactly famous for inspiring GUIs - it has strong talents but they are difficult to unleash. Cezanne leverages all the great visual capabilities that Swing does provide, but in addition, it packages them and makes them easily accessible: transparent windows and popups can be equipped with glow and drop shadow effects, arbitrary areas can be covered with realistic material textures, GUI components can have non-rectangular shapes. Have you ever experienced how valuable an application appears when it exposes leather and chrome elements?

Free-style to serve the usage context

Freedom of styling means everything to us - we know from experience that visually catering to a GUI component's usage context is an effective means to kick-start usability improvements.

• radio buttons that look and feel like tab controls when used to switch between views
• scrollbars that appear more lightweight when nested in another container with a scrollbar
• push buttons that present themselves more prominent when intended for reacting on a modal dialog...

...the list is endless. Therefore, Cezanne was designed to support maximum freedom of style with minimum effort.

Motion and emotion - superior animations for extensive joy of use

Modern user interfaces show where we are heading: GUIs become animated for a more compelling and more engaging user experience. Cezanne allows your Java™-based GUIs to catch up with the leading representatives. Regardless of whether you decide to subtly animate transitions between a GUI element's states or want to move entire screen regions - Cezanne's superb rendering performance makes smooth animations possible and thus provides a strong contribution to a greater joy of use.

Universal Design

Because accessibility and
localization issues do matter

The digital globalization makes it happen: people from an increasing number of countries with more diverse cultural backgrounds and physical constitutions gain access to user interfaces. Good to be well equipped for these challenges through Cezanne's numerous accessibility and localization improvements.

Usability for everyone

Novice users, power users, physically challenged users - they all should be able to use your software effectively. Therefore, a Look and Feel that runs with Cezanne comes with a couple of handy accessibility improvements. If, for example, controls would exceed screen space, the Look & Feel will automatically show a chevron button to allow users to access functionality, which would otherwise be hidden, via a popup menu. Power users, as another example, are provided with accelerator hints in tooltips in order to boost learning important keyboard shortcuts. Finally, people with impaired vision benefit from special Look & Feel variants that present GUI elements with larger fonts and higher contrasts for better readability.

Prepared for the global village - through comprehensive localization

Over half a billion people write and read from right to left. Certainly, those who are software users expect a GUI to reflect this practice. How, for example, would you perceive a software product if you first had to scroll an entire line of text to the opposite direction just to start reading? Cezanne straightens and professionalizes Swing's RTL (right to left) support with features such as automatic mirroring of components in split panes, support for non-latin mnemonics, correct anchoring of scroll pane contents at the top-right position and many more.

Technical Integration

Cezanne's integration convenience turns
Look & Feels into quick wins

Java™ coined the term "Pluggable Look & Feel" - and the Cezanne Look & Feel engine takes it very literally. Together with a custom Look & Feel theme that we tailor to your specific requirements, you can add Cezanne to your software project and activate or deactivate all its powerful UI features with a single line of code. And since the same Cezanne core is shared and used productively by all customers using our Look & Feel engine, you benefit from its industry-proven stability and flexibility, right from the start.

Loose as coupling can be

As we are convinced of the benefits that Cezanne brings into your GUI, we do not want to artificially tie you to our solution. Therefore, visual styles are loosely bound to your GUI components so that you can easily remove Cezanne and your Look & Feel theme at any time without any compile time errors or runtime exceptions. Also, thanks to the Look and Feel mixing feature you can keep up using your preferred Look and Feel and just partially style those components that you consider to be in need of change.

Cezanne and Swing - together in harmony

With a Cezanne-based Look & Feel, assigning pre-defined UI resources such as fonts and colors works as simple as it should be: as Cezanne supports over 300 well-known Swing UI default keys, you can continue using them as usual. Plus, Cezanne's strong cell-renderer interoperability features enable you to reuse most of your existing custom cell renderer code as is. What is your benefit from this strict compliance to Swing standards? Painless integration and quick results even for large-scale systems that have evolved over time.

Cezanne and Windows Aero - together in harmony, again

A custom window appearance is the key to strong software branding. On the other hand, the application's main window should integrate seamlessly with the operating system it is running on. For Windows-based applications, Cezanne picks the best of both worlds: while most window effects are handled natively by the operating system - this way achieving superior performance and keeping Window's familiar Aero effects - the window's content area is left under Cezanne's control, allowing for nearly unlimited visual results.

Maintenance & Support

In the rare case of a problem - there is help in a lot of ways

Cezanne is an industry-proven and serviced software product that undergoes continuous development and improvement. Following our strict quality policy, we do not only focus on Cezanne's "hard skills" (the functional features) but also on its "soft skills" such as maintainability, extensibility, performance and development convenience. And our support staff is at your service in case you encounter any problems.

Continuous support - and peace of mind

We can guide you through the technical process of exchanging your application's Look & Feel from start to end. As a kick-start we provide you with an evaluation Look & Feel free of charge to eliminate technology risks on your side. And when it comes to integrating your Look & Feel, we work in close cooperation with your development team. In the rare case of problems, we provide you with competent personal technical help. You can choose among several different service levels to define an appropriate reaction time. Just mail to and one of our Look & Feel experts will contact you.

A quick reference for developers - introducing the style catalog

The style catalog, shipping with every Cezanne-based Look & Feel, allows you to browse your GUI component styles in a comfortable and quick fashion. Thanks to expressive before/after illustrations of styleable GUI elements together with small code snippets, developers can quickly see what style results in which visual effect or when to use a particular style. Finally, you can export the style catalog as a PDF file to print it out as a hardcopy or make it part of your corporate style guide document.

Say "goodbye" to rendering issues

As Look & Feels largely consist of graphical operations, detecting and debugging potential problems can be tedious work. During our long-time experience with Look & Feel development we therefore established convenient diagnostic tools that let us reveal common problems within seconds. Our performance bottleneck indicator, for example, can be activated at runtime and shows in no time which parts of the screen suffer from slow rendering performance.

Quality

Cezanne's power in details
starts where others stop

Look & Feel development includes a lot of detail work. And Cezanne was designed to meet the high demands that come with that kind of work. Our design philosophy demands us not to stop when a Look & Feel is just "good". We strive to towards providing a best-in-class Look & Feel experience in the Java™ world.

Faster and smoother than the rest

Cezanne is a racer. Optimized for benefitting as much as possible from graphics hardware acceleration it frees up CPU time for the really important issues that your application needs to solve. Independent benchmark tools such as LightBeam confirm that Cezanne not only leaves behind modern Look & Feels such as Nimbus - even the Metal Look and Feel with its humble graphical demands does not stand a chance in terms of rendering performance. Among other things, love of detail to us means making super-smooth animations with frame rates of at least 30 fps possible.

Layout for the pros

To establish clean and aesthetic layouts it is important to align typographical elements according to their baseline. Cezanne offers complete baseline support for all Swing components - not even Swing itself does this. In addition, Cezanne enhances Swing in regard to several other layout problems, too: menus are properly sized and positioned, tooltips appear on the correct display device and are properly located below the mouse cursor even in multi-monitor operation. Among other things, love of detail to us means aligning every single pixel properly, even if some users will not even consciously perceive the difference.

Feature Highlights