Swing Hacks

Make Quick Look and Feel Changes #86

Chapter 11, Native Integration and Packaging

|

437

HACK

Some components even have borders. Menu items have borders but they are

turned off by default. You need to set an extra boolean to make a new bor-

der show up, as in Figure 11-14.

Border border = BorderFactory.createEtchedBorder(

EtchedBorder.LOWERED);

UIManager.put("MenuItem.border", border);

UIManager.put("MenuItem.borderPainted", new Boolean(true));

Use System Colors

The UIManager lets you change any color in your application to whatever you

want. Now, what if you wanted to create a theme that matched the native

operating system closer? You could hardcode some color values for each OS,

but most windowing systems also let their users customize their colors.

Hardcoded values wouldn’t take those dynamic colors into account. Fortu-

nately, AWT provides a way out: the

SystemColor class.

Figure 11-13. A JTextField with large insets

Figure 11-14. Menu items with etched borders

438

|

Chapter 11, Native Integration and Packaging

#86 Make Quick Look and Feel Changes

HACK

SystemColor is a special subclass of Color that provides access to most of the

standard color settings of any operating system. It also has the special abil-

ity to update itself whenever the underlying system color changes. This

means if the user switches ...