Window Decoration, Part 3 - Custom Decoration for Dialogs(18:12, 23. Mar. 2010)
In Window Decoration Part 1 and Part 2 you've learned some basics about customizing window decorations based on predefined themes. In case that you want to use a totally different look for some of your windows, you can use named UI-properties to apply a new style to a window instance. The example below describes how to create a translucent window decoration for dialogs - you can also see similar dialogs on a very popular phone.
The first step is to create a translucent image file which will be used for our special dialog.
The Synth file blueWindow.xml contains the declarations of the named default properties. Please note that the dialog name (BlueWindow) is appended to each needed default property - that's what we call named default property and that's also the way how static UI-properties become dynamic in Synthetica.
Note: The example works for dialogs and for non-maximizable frames. For maximizable frames some additional properties have to be specified. Because of some JVM bugs, for proper execution Java 6u14 or above is required - on MAC Java 1.5 is good enough.