Swing Hacks

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Chapter 2, Lists and Combos

#16 Make Different List Items Look Different

HACK

When you click on items in the list, their selection state is shown with

checkboxes, as seen in Figure 2-6.

Notice how the checkboxes are all you need to see what’s selected. In an

early version of this hack, I went out of my way to maintain the usual selec-

tion colors and it looked lousy, probably because there were two competing

metaphors to show the selection: the highlight and the checkbox. Since this

hack totally changes how the JList works, it’s appropriate to radically

change its appearance, too.

H A C K

#16

Make Different List Items Look Different Hack #16

An in-progress download shouldn’t look like a completed one.

What made me love lists again were the OmniWeb browser and (later)

Safari—particularly, their download managers. By way of negative example,

take the download manager for Internet Explorer 5 for Mac...please. This

GUI was a table of filenames, URLs, sizes, etc., with columns not even intel-

ligently resized for their widths. OmniWeb, on the other hand, showed a

running download with a progress bar, and a finished download with the

defaultComp.getListCellRendererComponent (list, value, index,

isSelected, cellHasFocus);

checkbox.setSelected (isSelected);

Component[] comps = getComponents( );

for (int i=0; i<comps.length; i++) {

comps[i].setForeground (listForeground);

comps[i].setBackground (listBackground); ...