James Weaver’s JavaFX Blog

You had me at Least Common Multiple :-)

One of the student winners of the the JavaFX Coding Challenge is Kazuki Hamasaki, who created the CalcFX program.  CalcFX is a deceptively functional (and incredibly useful) calculator, and is now one of the Java Web Start shortcuts on my desktop.

Kazuki: If you're reading this, please create a desktop icon for CalcFX so that it doesn't blend in with the usual coffee-cup icons deposited by Java Web Start.  For those wondering, just put the following line subordinate to the information element of the JNLP file:

<icon href="some_icon.png" width="64" height="64"/>

Congrats, and nice work, Kazuki!

Jim Weaver

The End is Near (for the September '09 JFXStudio Coding Challenge)

If you've hung around senior [-citizen] programmers (or are one), you've no doubt heard tales such as "we only had 4K of memory, and had to make use of every byte/bit".  For your amusement and edification, here's a picture from thegreatgeekmanual.com of the first Apple II (circa 1977), which sported 4K of RAM:

Josh Marinacci's latest JavaFX Studio Challenge is a bit reminiscent of these good old days, in that he is encouraging us to create a cool JavaFX program that "must not be more than 30 lines of code or 3000 characters (your choice)".

The deadline for submitting your entry for this JFXStudio Challenge is midnight Wednesday night (30 September 2009). The challenge is to create something cool in only 30 lines of JavaFX Script code, using the theme of 'Time'. To give you some ideas Josh has posted his own entry. Take a look for some inspiration!

Speaking of contests, the winners of the WidgetFX Developers Contest were announced yesterday, and I'd like to convey my congratulations to Pär Dahlberg (ScreenshotFX widget), Yannick Van Godtsenhoven (RadioFX widget), and Larry Dickson (Weather widget).  A screenshot of these widgets in the WidgetFX dock is shown on the right. I'm using the RadioFX widget as I'm writing this to listen to an internet music channel that plays baroque music.

Regards, and congratulations again to these winners!

Jim Weaver

Pickin' and grinnin' with the JFXtras Picker control

If you've been following this blog recently, you know that I've been developing an application in the SpeedReaderFX category that helps me quickly keep up on new happenings in world events, technology, gadgets, music, and social networks.  SpeedReaderFX is located in the JFXtras open source project, and also serves as an example of using JFXtras classes with JavaFX.

One of the newest enhancements made to the SpeedReaderFX program takes advantage of the Picker control that David Armitage created in the JFXtras project.  Here's a screen shot of a program in the JFXtras project that he created to demonstrate and test the Picker control varieties:

SpeedReaderFX uses the spinner-style variation of the Picker control, shown in the Thumb Wheel row of the screen shot above.  This enables SpeedReaderFX users to quickly choose how many entries of a given feed-type (e.g. Yahoo News feeds), to display in the scrolling table.  The screen shot below shows a portion of the SpeedReaderFX Criteria dialog in which the Pickers appear:

As noted previously in the Picker demo screen shot, the user can operate the mouse wheel, as well as the keyboard or mouse buttons, to select the desired number.

For more information about the SpeedReaderFX application, check out the first post in the SpeedReaderFX category of this blog.  To run the application, click the SpeedReaderFX icon located on the left side of this paragraph.

By the way, since this dialog is getting pretty crowded, Dean Iverson is creating some UI design comps in which each feed type will have its own page.  I've also received other ideas from readers that I plan to implement, and would like to express my appreciation for your continued input!

Regards,

Jim Weaver

Adding feeds to SpeedReaderFX that don't *quite* comply with the RSS/Atom formats

When adding more feeds to the SpeedReaderFX application's Criteria dialog, I found that some of them don't *quite* comply with RSS/Atom formats.  For example, I thought it'd be cool to have RSS feeds from Engadget and Gizmodo (what self-respecting geek wouldn't want those feeds?)  I also wanted to have a daily dose of Dilbert delivered, but in these three cases the JavaFX RSS API reported that the dates for the feed items were just prior to the OS epoch.

Naturally, I consulted the RSS/Atom Smasher himself (Rakesh Menon) and he instructed me in the ways of creating a custom feed parser, which I added to SpeedReaderFX.  Here's a partial screenshot of the Criteria dialog where you can select the Gizmodo, Engadget, TechCrunch, and Dilbert feeds:

For more information about the SpeedReaderFX application, check out the first post in the SpeedReaderFX category of this blog.  To run the application, click the SpeedReaderFX icon located on the left side of this paragraph.

By the way, one of the next things that SpeedReaderFX needs is a GUI makeover (I've received lots of helpful feedback in that regard, and my graphical skills are admittedly weak).  Please leave a comment to this post if you have ideas or graphic comps that would make this look more like an iPhone app.  SpeedReaderFX is a sample in the open source JFXtras project, and your contributions to the appearance of this application would be much appreciated and acknowledged on this blog.

Enjoy!
Jim Weaver

Sten Anderson Wins the JavaFX Coding Challenge with a Rockin App!

Congratulations to the winners of the JavaFX Coding Challenge: Sten Anderson, Naoaki Suganuma, and Evgeni Sergeev!  The apps written by all three winners are oustanding, and 1st-place winner Sten Anderson's Music Explorer FX app is IMHO brilliant!  Here's a screenshot from the app:

Sten's JavaFX app enables the user to navigate among musical artists whose music has a degree of similarity by making use of Echo Nest web services.  The Music Explorer FX app has a graphically pleasing user interface that helps the user explore interesting details about musical artists and the connections between them.  The Help page even features one of my favorite groups: Liquid Tension Experiment :-)

Congrats again to Sten, Naoaki and Evgen!

Jim Weaver

TwitterFX and TweetBox: A Couple of JavaFX Twitter Clients

Having recently start tweeting, I am pleased to report on a couple of Twitter clients under development: TwitterFX and TweetBox.

TwitterFX is an open source project led by Steve Herod of Australia.  At this writing it is v0.17, and already has a nice feature set.  Here is a screenshot of TwitterFX:

 

Who are the tweeters in the screenshots?

• Steve Herod: The leader of the TwitterFX project, and prolific blogger.
• Silveira Neto: The Sun Tech Lead and CS Student in Brazil that I've featured on this blog in the context of game development.  Coincidentally, he has a recent post entitled Reading Twitter with JavaFX in which he shows very succinctly how to do just that!
• Jonathan Giles: The Swing links of the week blogger located in New Zealand.
• Alex Ruiz: The leader of the FEST-Swing and Fest-JavaFX projects, which provide a fluent interface for functional Swing GUI, and JavaFX GUI testing, respectively.  Alex is located in the US as am I.
• Andres Almiray: Groovy guru, speaker, and GUI builder aficionado.  Located in the US, and has a very enlightening blog.

TweetBox is a JavaFX Twitter client being developed by IT 2.0 evangelist and Blokmark blogger Mark Nankmanof of the Netherlands.

I look forward to seeing the progress of both of these JavaFX Twitter clients!

Regards,
Jim Weaver
JavaFXpert.com