Swing Hacks

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Chapter 11, Native Integration and Packaging

#82 Control iTunes on Mac OS X

HACK

Jump on the Brushed Metal Bandwagon

Apparently, Mac applications are no longer cool unless they use the brushed

metal L&F of Apple’s various iApps, such as iTunes, iChat, etc. Fortu-

nately, it’s easy to pick up that appearance for your Java application. Just set

the property

apple.awt.brushMetalLook to true. This produces windows like

the one seen in Figure 11-7.

Apple’s documentation of this feature says that this should be applied to

your primary application window only, not supporting dialogs or prefer-

ence windows, but it’s hard to see how that rule can be enforced when this

property causes all your windows to pick up the brushed metal look

automatically.

H A C K

#82

Control iTunes on Mac OS X Hack #82

With a few bits of AppleScript, you can monitor and control Macintosh iTunes

from your own application.

You can make some really great applications using plain Java, but the soft-

ware world isn’t what it used to be. The buzzword for new applications is

integration. Modern programs are defined not only by what they do, but

what they can talk to. The poster child for integration these days is iTunes,

Figure 11-6. Mac grow box with space reserved for it at the bottom of JFrame

Figure 11-7. Swing window with brushed metal appearance