Beautifying a SWT application on Mac

Question

SWT is designed to be cross-platform, so it can run on a Mac. The problem is it commits the cardinal sin of Macland - it's UGLY. Toolbars don't look like Mac toolbars, status bars don't look like Mac status bars, etc.

Does anyone have any experience in making an SWT application look more like a Mac application? For example, by making platform-specific JNI calls via the 'OS' class in SWT? If so, how difficult was it?

(This question arises because we are looking at porting an existing SWT app designed to run on Windows)

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Mark,

The best I can offer is to use either MacWidgets or Quaqua which are both free and in different stages of maturity. The bad news would be that they are both Swing based which is probably not what you want to hear.

Answer 2

You can make your application look and behave like mac application easily. Apple supplies a application called JarBundler with it you can put your menu items up where they belong it will also build a double click able executable, and you can set a icon.

Swing components on Mac OS X looks a lot like their cocoa components, and for OS X you can set some special flags that will make them just like their cocoa counter parts, such as you can set a flag for a JTextField and make it look like cocoa search field.

Also all Macs come with java pre-installed so thats one less worry.

Answer 3

This is usually problem of Swing not SWT (SWT is directly linked to OS/framework provided widgets) - a quote from A gentle introduction to SWT and JFace [2]:

SWT is a library that creates a Java view of the native host operating system GUI controls. It is host implementation-dependent. This means SWT-based applications have several key characteristics: 1. They look, act, and perform like "native" applications. 2. The widgets provided reflect the widgets (the components and controls) provided on the host operating system. 3. Any special behavior of the host GUI libraries is reflected in SWT GUIs.

The pre 3.5 Milestone used to use Carbon framework and now the 3.5+ supports both 32/64bit Cocoa framework [1] so perhaps that has caused you confusion? Or can you be more specific, give us the version you use and some screenshots / sample code to reproduce?

I have been developing java application based on SWT/Eclipse RCP for a while on OSX and have not found and major problem with look&feel (of cause it does not 100% comply the Apple HID [3] as it complies with Eclipse UIG)

Answer 4

I often use the odd "platform queries" to tweak an app. For example, its not really about dressing up an app and more about (for example) making the exit menu option say "Quit" on Mac and "Exit on windows. There are some Mac style guidelines that I can't get round like this but it may help.

See Patform.java for the switching class and ExitAction.java for an example of its use.

Good luck with it :D

Answer 5

I created support for the Mac OS native toolbar first for Carbon then for the Cocoa version of SWT. At the time I managed to transfer the eclipse perspective switcher to a native toolbar. I had no Obj-C experience so the Cocoa version was more work than the Carbon version, but when all is told, it is not really hard. After supporting the toolbar, I wrote some code to support Alpha Compositing, native image transparency, hardware accelerated effects (CAAnimation). For these, the more difficult part was to understand why some APIs were not even available to be generated by the Eclipse JNI generator. Turned out that the python bridge generator that provided by apple had not been upgraded for the Obj-C 2.0 Property syntax. When I fixed that, I was able to have the SWT JNI Generator spit out the missing APIs. From there, using them was the easy part. You can find some partial pieces of this in the eclipse.org bugzilla server.

I can't say it is always simple, but if you already know Obj-C, then you should be able to do anything you want. A couple days ago I started working on SWT Cocoa again, to add support for ARGB images (as opposed to the limited transparency support offered by ImageData).

Good luck.