Here we go again…

A few months ago i started a new project where i again focussed on gauges (i love that stuff). It took me some time because i only work on the project on my spare time (which is rare) but now i finished a first version of a little library that contains a lot of gauges for Java applications…

First of all i have to mention that this library was not meant to be a professional components library and should not be used on mission critical software. Means if you use the library it’s on your own risk !

I’ve never before created a component library and for me it was and is a great challenge to dive deeper into the Java universe…

But now let’s have some fun…

The library contains two general types of gauges, radial and linear ones and some little candy in the form of additional components like a Radar component etc.

I add some properties to the gauges that hopefuly will be useful for some of you.

Here is a short list of the most interesting features:

• frameDesign (metal, shiny metal, blackmetal)
• backgroundColor (dark gray, light gray, white, black, beige, red, green blue)
• pointer/bar color (red, green, blue, yellow, orange)
• a three colored track to visualize areas of special interest (e.g. a critical temperature range)
• thresholdIndicator
• blinking threshold led (red, green, blue, orange, yellow)
• adjustable tickmarks
• indicators for min. and max. measured values
• auto reset to zero feature

It should be possible for you to create your own components out of these library and  if you’ll take a look at the source you will find components like Radial1Lcd, Radial2Lcd and Radial3Lcd where i used Netbeans matisse gui builder to create the component from the FrameCircular and DisplaySingle components.

So you should be able to check read the sourcecode of these components and see how i did it (the easiest way would be to use Netbeans to check the source).

But to give you a impression, let pictures speak… weiterlesen

Sitting at Gard du Nord train station in Paris in January this year i saw this huge departure board:

It was fascinating to see and hear all these flipping characters everytime a departure time changed. I guess most of you know already how these boards work but for all others i will explain it shortly.

The arriving trains are in chronological order from top to bottom of the board which means the trains that arrives as next stays on top of the board.
The flipping characters are made of little metal plates that are printed on the front and backside with characters that are split into half. The Top part of the character is printed on the frontside of the upper plate and the bottom part of the character is printed on the backside of the lower plate (i tried to visualize it with a little image). weiterlesen

Remember the worldclock blogpost? Well it was ok but i thought there was one thing missing…

Weather information

For that reason i added this missing feature to the known worldclock component so that you now might choose out of four clocks:

• Pure clock and icon indicator for time of day
• Pure clock, icon indicator for time of day and weather information
• Clock with inbuild time of day display
• Clock with inbuild time of day display and weather information

This image shows all available clocks:

To get the weather information for all the cities in the enum i provide, i needed to add the country for each city and by adding all these countries i translated the cities to their (hopefully) right english names (in the original worldclock post i used german city names).

I use weather underground to retrieve the weather information because they provide an easy to access service for free. You will find a package called „net“ in the project in which i put the classes responsible for fetching the weather condition. There is timer which checks every 30 seconds for the availability of the connection.
The clockpanels will every 10 minutes add a so called ConditionFetcher thread to the queue of the WeatherService which will be handled by a ExecutorService. The WeatherService will tries to use the system proxy server if there is one so it hopefuly works out for you.

The most of the work was done by creating all the different weather condition images which you will see in the next image:

weiterlesen

During my trip to JFokus conference last month i was waiting for the train on a german trainstation.
Because i started working on a little swing tool (i will blog about it later) for our usergroup i was in the need for a analog clock.
So the german railway company „Deutsche Bahn“ has a famous analog clock on nearly every german trainstation which looks like this:

weiterlesen