Ok, this question crosses the Swing/AWT/Java2D divide, but I'll try here first.
Is there any way to create something resembling a "modern day" mp3 player GUI? I'm talking about the way the media players like Quicktime or Windows Media player can switch to a "compact mode" where the player window is non-rectangular shaped, and contains little animated panels that can slide in and out to display things like equalizer settings or play lists, etc. I think I could figure out how to do the animated panel openings and closings within a JPanel or Component with custom drawing, clipping, and a background thread. But I would have to draw the whole player completely enclosed inside a top-level window, and that would not look very "cool", if you know what I mean. (I have pretty much given up on Inner frames) I just realized that if AWT provided transparent native-windows that could be completely undecorated, I could just put my player in there and any "curves" would be illusions created within the square window, with the appropriate background pixels just made 100% transparent. (If you implement this using alpha, you could also probably get translucent windows for free, as transparent is just a special case of translucent where the opacity is 0%) The only other thing that would be pure gravy is the ability to add additional regions to the "window dragging" handler, since there wouldn't be a window title, I'd need something for the user to be able to click on to move the window around the screen. Maybe some call to set a certain color value to be the "hot color" that could be set up as a drag target. >From a strictly native programming point of view, i.e., MFC, Cocoa, etc, I don't think implementing this kind of window behavior is that hard or risky, you just have to write a new kind of window definition class for each platform ....a long time ago this would have been a WDEF under Mac OS (pre-X). Anyway, I'm guessing what I am trying to do can't be currently done in Java eh? If that's the case, I would suggest maybe evaluating the real benefits this would provide to Java developers, especially for deploying applications in the consumer space, where these kinds of eye-candy are now common place. Sun *is* trying to push Java into the consumer mainstream right? Rob =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA2D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
