Swing Hacks

Indefinite Progress Indicator #47

Chapter 6, Transparent and Animated Windows

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247

HACK

Figure 6-11 shows the slide-in window on Mac OS X. It’s less appropriate

on the Mac, and it will be obscured if the user has dock magnification

turned on, but it’s not really bad either.

Hacking the Hack

To expand this hack, the first thing you’d probably want to do is add some

kind of

MouseListener so that if the user clicks to acknowledge the appear-

ance of the slide-in window, you could react to it by removing the slide-in

window, bringing your application’s main window to the front, etc. Then

again, you can put live components in here, so there’s no reason you

couldn’t just generate a

JOptionPane, make a JDialog from it, grab the con-

tent pane of that

JDialog, and show it in the slide-in window. That would

give you real, active Swing buttons and handy

JOptionPane return values.

After all, that’s what the sheet example did.

H A C K

#47

Indefinite Progress Indicator Hack #47

Despite its numerous advanced widgets, Swing offers no efficient way to

show that a task of unknown length is in progress. This hack presents two

solutions to address this issue.

Have you ever watched an application do something, but not tell you what

that something is? Other applications let you know what’s going on but

don’t really tell you how long they will need to complete the task. For

instance, the Microsoft Windows copy dialog is famous