You can launch The GIMP and its GTK UI, Mozilla and its very own look and feel, KMail and its QT UI, etc. Linux and Solaris users, for instance, are used to seeing mixed toolkits on the screen. Funnily, they are mainly Windows developers/users. Windows LAFs have always been awkward: they almost look and feel like Windows, but not exactly. And it is very hard to duplicate the look and behaviour of a widget when you don’t have access to its source code. Since Swing does not rely on any native widgets, LAF developers need to recreate them all by themselves. Unfortunately they completely failed, mainly on Windows. “These LAFs should have helped delivering a better desktop experience. He’s an experienced developer and commentator on UI design, and recently started an internship at Sun working on LAFs, (NB all views expressed here are his own, and not of his employer!): Yet, the irony here is that MS themselves have taken great effort to deviate away from the normal Windows look (and from a intra-MS perspective, their own products also deviate from each other, where Office looks different to Media Player, which looks different to Messenger, and so on). Three extremely popular pieces of software for Windows, written by Microsoft. Take Microsoft Office, Microsoft Media Player and Microsoft Messenger. However, does this really matter? Let’s look at Microsoft software for example. ![]() ![]() They often feel disappointed that the Windows LAF bundled with Java doesn’t do an adequate job of looking like a Windows application. There are many Java developers who program with only the Windows platform in mind. Also, is the issue of platform fidelity really as big an issue as many developers think? However, this isn’t the end of the story. To be honest, they have a point! That’s not to say that there aren’t many devs (and users) out there who are happy with the LAFs Java ships, but there is work to be done. ![]() The platform specific LAFs lack fidelity, i.e., they’re not convincingly native.The default cross-platform LAF is “ugly”.However, one of the chief complaints of Java desktop applications is its “look”. By default, Java ships with a cross-platform look-and-feel (LAF), which means your apps can look consistent across all platforms, or LAFs that mimic the look of a specific platform, say Windows, for example. Java Swing comes with “pluggable look-and-feel technology”, which essentially boils down to the fact that interfaces can be “skinned” (although this is simplifying a tad) and is therefore, extremely flexible.
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