<Swing Dev> Background/Foreground colors and Gtk Look and Feel

[Omair Majid]

Hi Mike,

Mike Swingler wrote:
> On Jan 22, 2009, at 3:12 AM, Kirill Kirichenko wrote:
> 
>> Hi Omar
>> Sorry for delay from out side.
>> I'm a responsible engineer for GTK L&F.
>>
>> Omair Majid wrote:
>>
>>> I have noticed a few issues in the Gtk Look and Feel and would like 
>>> to know what the correct behaviour should be. The attached program 
>>> shows a few of my concerns.
>>> 1) For each of the components, setForeground(color) and/or 
>>> setBackground(color) assignments are randomly ignored. Is this the 
>>> expected behaviour? I can understand that using the native look and 
>>> feel, the feel is exactly preserved and the programmer's preferences 
>>> are ignored. But there doesn't seem to be any consistency - some 
>>> components accept the color changes, some silently ignore it. Is 
>>> there a list showing whether setForeground() and setBackground() is 
>>> ignored for each swing component with the gtk look and feel?
>>
>> Generally GTK L&F leverages theme settings for colors, indents and 
>> fonts. And you shouldn't be able to change them using standard swing 
>> API when GTK L&F is active. Sometimes this does work but you shouldn't 
>> use this feature. This is the policy for GTK L&F. Actually the have 
>> been similar requests and I tried to resolve the issue. The thing is 
>> GTK itself doesn't allow changing colors freely for all components it 
>> just uses the theme settings.
> 
> This is basically the policy of the Aqua Look and Feel on Mac OS X as 
> well. Sometimes we do pick up the foreground/background colors for some 
> controls where it makes sense, or the TCK requires us to, but generally, 
> we use our own system artwork to draw these controls.

Thanks for the insight!

> Not every component (particularly non-rectangular ones) have a good 
> sense of what a "background" color is. Also, on Mac OS X, we are 
> particularly sensitive to allowing developers to create rainbow 
> kaleidoscope apps that clash with the rest of the Mac OS X desktop 
> experience, and try to make Java apps that have not necessarily tested 
> on our platform still look like Mac apps.

I agree, getting Java apps to blend in with the rest of the desktop 
seems like the right thing to do. I just wasnt sure if that was 
intentional or not in the gtk look and feel.

Cheers,

Omair