Open source plugins to Jalbum

2 years ago RobM

Thanks for that David. I'll have a play around and then update my skin. It does, I think though, show that beginners in Java stand a better chance of progressing with working examples. It also proves what a great place Jalbum is for trainee coders. I couldn't have got as far as I have without the support of all of the friendly people in the forums and you and your team.

2 years ago David Ekholm

Sorry, I should have made the example fully working inside an onload.bsh file and not just point out the key functionality of this class. Now I've added two lines to make it a fully working copy-and-paste example.

2 years ago RobM

Thanks David, I've Googled and found some stuff that should help in general. I've also tried the example code from the StateMonitor API page but it doesn't work (for me, anyway)!

I started with an empty onload.bsh page and added the code starting from:
ControlPanel ui = new ControlPanel() {

That gave an error "Class: ControlPanel not found in namespace", so I added (before the code):
import se.datadosen.component.*;
import se.datadosen.util.*;

That stopped the error but there is no Skin settings to open up and look at.
I'm obviously missing something out but I don't know what - hence my 'need' to see real life examples of working code.

2 years ago David Ekholm

Thanks for your input Robert! There is a wealth of user guides on making user interface stuff in Java and "Swing" (the name for Java's UI component library) on the Internet. Just Google java swing examples and java swing tutorial. This stuff is not Jalbum specific. If you copy the code sample from the StateMonitor API page to an empty "onload.bsh" file you will be able to see how the synchronization of component state is handled by a skin.

2 years ago RobM

I still struggle with the Custom Interface and the tutorial page on 'Creating custom user interface' is a bit basic. For absolute beginners more information would help, like how to add sub-tabs, alert boxes, grey out options that can't be used under certain instances etc.

I've learnt a lot by looking at other skins, but it hasn't always been easy or obvious and I still haven't got down to making some things not selectable. I know there is information, like the 'State Monitor' but as I'm not a Java programmer it is not the same as having an example of working code to work from.

I've learnt a lot here at Jalbum and I'm still learning, but I'm stubborn and will keep trying whilst I think a lot of potential skin developers may be more easily put off, especially if they have to learn HTML, CSS, Java, javascript and English (the latter is probably the hardest, I should know as t is my native tongue! ;-) ).

What do others think?

2 years ago David Ekholm

@dom, Yes, if you go to the new plugins section, there are links to the project site for each of these plugins. There you can find Subversion links to access the source code, for instance to download it straight to your Netbeans project.

2 years ago David Ekholm

Thanks Robert. Yes we hope that these changes will trigger more users to become skin developers. What do you think is the biggest hurdle now?

2 years ago RobM

I think the tutorial page is now really good for people thinking of doing their own skin. The layout and content make it very easy to read and follow. Start simple and before you know it you can build something you maybe thought you'd never be able to.

2 years ago CLOSED USER

(user closed)

2 years ago David Ekholm

8.5.3 is back online. I had to temporarily revert to 8.5.1 to fix a bug in the packaging of 8.5.3: Three bundled skins didn't work as they were packaged one folder level too deep (skins/Boxer/Boxer instead of skins/Boxer for instance)

2 years ago pfoalbums

Hi - Thanks for 8.5.3 upgrade. Now, why does 8.5.1 still run? What happened to 8.5.3?