Archive for 'swing'
Mac OS X search-styled JTextField
Working on some design stuff for university, I found out a very convenient way to get a Mac OS X search-style textfield (like you find in _every_ Mac application) out of a standard JTextField.
Running a Swing application on Mac OS X Java, you normally use the Mac look-and-feel com.apple.laf.AquaLookAndFeel out of the box. The UI classes of this look-and-feel support various client properties, which can be set via putClientProperty(Object key, Object value) on every JComponent. Now, to get a search-style for your JTextField you just have to set the following property:
jTextField.putClientProperty("JTextField.variant", "search");
And now your plain old JTextField looks like this:
In addition, there are a lot of other client properties, which can help you in building Mac OS X-style applications in Swing: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2007/tn2196.html
Unfortunately this will only work when running the aforementioned Apple look-and-feel on a Mac OS X Java runtime environment (which will most likely be not available for > Java 6).