We're making an app for one of my classes that is supposed to draw the interest of 4th-6th graders, so we're looking to make a game type environment. I'm looking to find a seamless way to transfer from one page to the other. I've found that if you try to close and open frames it jumps and looks less professional, I was just wondering if there was any way for it to just communicate between panels that if a button is pressed on a panel, it will set that panel's visibility to false and set another panel to true(as though it has changed screens).
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I have written a Swing UI that has a JPanel with numerous controls and on the right hand side a few columns of JCheckBoxes. This is all handled by making the JPanel use a GridLayout. The problem I am having is that a given checkbox toggles it's selection status no matter where in it's grid "cell" you click in. Note, I am not using a JTable approach. The "cell" is just the rectangular area of the screen the GridLayout gave to the checkbox. It can be much bigger than the checkbox. I can't figure out how to make sure the checkboxes are only selectable when you click in the tiny box of the drawn control (not the big box of the "cell" that the checkbox is basically centered in). I've googled a lot and everyone talks about JTables. Again, I am not using a JTable. This issue is causing headaches for my users as they click on the application window and accidentally select an option!
The GridLayout forces all UI components to fill their cell completely, so the actual checkbox only gives the illusion that it's smaller than the cell it occupies. The solution here, as with many other more complex UI designs, is to use multiple layouts nested inside one another.
In your case, try putting all your check boxes inside a BoxLayout and using glue to space them as needed. This BoxLayout should be placed side by side with your GridLayout in another enclosing container (either a JPanel or your ContentPane -- I can't say for sure because you only gave a brief description of your UI with no code or illustration).
Play around with the idea of nesting layouts until you get something you like, and don't forget to try resizing your window to see what the layout manager does under the circumstances. The final appearance isn't always exactly what you imagine it will be.
I'm currently developing the menu of my application and I would like to know what's the proper way of coding a "stage based menu". What I mean by stage based menu is that, user clicks a button, the entire interface changes to the next "stage". Here are the pictures I designed in Photoshop in order to explain my idea:
First picture would be the first stage and the second picture the second.
Each round looking thing is a JButton
So far I got the main menu (fist picture) made on eclipse using WindowBuilder, made it as a JPanel and then I instantiate it on the window class.
My idea was to have an event listener listen for clicks on each button and then once the even is triggered, have the JPanel variable on the frame change to the next "stage". So I was wondering if this is actually the proper way of doing this or are there any better ways?
You could use a Card Layout to make it easy to swap panels.
Check out the section from the Swing tutorial on How to Use Card Layout for more information and examples.
The past few months I've been on a mission to implement widget support in my home screen replacement for Android, and it's proving rather difficult. I can now add and remove widgets to/from the home screen, but they can't be resized or moved yet. Currently what I'm trying to achieve is to resize them. To do this I have every widget embedded in a View, over which I put an overlay to make sure the touch events don't get caught by the widget underneath it (which caused trouble in past attempts).
What I have now is this layout for the container; http://www.hastebin.com/uwocaxukel.xml
The widget is put in the FrameLayout with id widgetContainer. As you can see in the screenshot below there is an orange dot in the middle of every border.
Now what I've always tried to do so far is catch touch events, figure out whether the user is trying to drag one of the borders (MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE), and if he is, change the required properties in the LayoutParams object and call this.requestLayout () on the view. This is finicky, and less than ideal. Very often the touch events would stop registering because the user dragged faster than the view could refresh = user is no longer on the view which is listening for touch events, or the border would be too thin to hit.
So far it's all been very finicky. But there are other apps which seem to do this pretty much perfectly. Is there a library, a class I've overlooked, or something else I can use to achieve my goal?
This is an example of something that kind of worked, but was very finicky and just not remotely user-friendly; https://github.com/RobinJ1995/be.robinj.ubuntu/blob/869d48af2e7a3d8f0332f84edd2a8cd28564424a/UbuntuLauncher/app/src/main/java/be/robinj/ubuntu/widgets/WidgetHostView.java#L75
I have a Vaadin application which contains a header and a menu bar as well. The menu bar provides options where some of which opens up a new Window much similar to a desktop MIDI application. However the window can be moved above the menu and over the header. Does anyone know how it is possible to limit the view movement to within the content area. This content area is currently a VerticalLayout.
There is no built-in way for doing this. I think you have couple of options:
Implement a callback that moves the window to right place after the drag. This is not optimal for usability as it makes the window jump around.
Create / extend the Vaadin's (sub-)Window drag handler to and apply limits there. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it could be, because you have to tinker with the browser's events directly.
I have been playing around with trying to get a menu screen for my game. I have only been able to figure out how to paint a new Screen on top of an existing one; meaning that the actual game is still running behind the title screen. I don't need actual code but just a description of how I would go about this.
One way to display a menu would by by using a JDialog outside of your main application window. Take a look at the How to Make Dialogs tutorial for more information.
Another possibility would be to use JInternalFrame for your game and menu so they can be wrapped in a larger application frame. These are explained nicely in How to Use Internal Frames