Swing Hacks

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Chapter 12, Miscellany

#89 Fun with Keyboard Lights

HACK

And More...

The most obvious enhancement is to use real images for the cursor, as the

many cursor packs available on the Web can attest (type “free cursors” into

Google and see what you get). Animated cursors could also be used to indi-

cate other elements of program state, such as network traffic or the current

tool in use. With a few images and the help of the

setCursor( ) function, you

can do almost anything.

H A C K

#89

Fun with Keyboard Lights Hack #89

Flash the Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock keys for extra user

feedback.

The AWT and Swing APIs are huge and full of robust components and

frameworks for building big applications. They also have some dark corners

where the lesser-known functions live. While cruising through the JavaDoc

for

java.awt.Toolkit, I ran across a function I had never noticed before,

despite it being in the API for over four years. This hack explores building a

keyboard busy indicator using the

Toolkit.setLockingKeyState( ) function.

The root class of AWT,

Toolkit, has a very interesting little function:

setLockingKeyState( ). You pass it the KeyEvent for the key you want to lock

down and turn it on or off with the

boolean. For most keyboards, this means

the Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock keys (some keyboards may also

have a Kana lock for Kanji support). Now that you have this nifty little func-

tion, what should ...