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What's Wrong With The Windows XP Look And Feel
This document describes problems with the appearance of Swing programs
running on Windows XP. We tested using JDK 1.4.2_01.
A number of problems were seen when using either the "High Contrast
Black" or "High Contrast White" color schemes. You can configure your
machine to use these schemes by doing the following:
1. Open the Control Panel
2. Open the Accessibility Options
3. Click the Display page and check the Use High Contrast check box.
Then click the Settings button. The "Settings for High Contrast"
dialog will open; it contains a combobox that contains a number of
preset color schemes, including "High Contrast Black" and "High
Contrast White". Pick one and click the OK button to close the
dialog, then click OK on the "Accessibility Options" dialog.
System Colors
The colors used in some Swing components are incorrect. Here's what we
noticed:
1. The color of JLabel should be SystemColor.windowText, not
SystemColor.controlText. You can see this by changing the window
text color using XP's "Display Properties" dialog ? make the text
blue, and you'll see that JLabels still paint black text (black is
the default control text color.)
2. The color of disabled JLabels is incorrect. In the "High Contrast
Black" color scheme, they are being drawn green instead of gray.
3. The background color of a disabled JTextField is not the same as
that of a JPasswordField. With the default XP color scheme, the
default JTextField color is (235,235,228) while the disabled
JPasswordField background color is (255,255,255). They should be
the same.
4. JTree expansion button border is drawn with the wrong color. It
should be SystemColor.textInactiveText. You can see the difference
by running XP in high contrast mode. Here's what a native tree
looks like:
(note the green button box)
and here's what a JTree looks like: (note the gray box)
5. The color of disabled menu items is incorrect. In high-contrast
mode, you can easily see what's wrong.
Here's what it should look like:
And here's the Swing equivalent: (the text should NOT be green.)
6. The text of disabled JRadioButtonMenuItem and JCheckBoxMenuItem is
not painted correctly. In the "High Contrast Black" color scheme,
the text is drawn in green (it should be gray), and the text does
not have the white shadow which is present for disabled JMenuItem
objects.
7. The color of the accelerator text for disabled JCheckBoxMenuItem
is incorrect. In the "High Contrast Black" color scheme, the text
is drawn black, making it unreadable against the black menu
background.
This is probably due to the use of the brigher and darker functions in
BasicMenuItemUI.paintMenuItem in the code which paints the
accelerator text. Using these functions will never yield correct
results when using the High Contrast Black color scheme.
8. Disabled JButton text is drawn with the wrong color in high
contrast mode. The symptoms are the same as above ? the text is
drawn in bright green instead of gray.
9. The background area of scrollbars (i.e. the part between the
buttons and the thumb) is not correct. This is obvious in
high-contrast mode where the area is painted white, but should be
gray.
Here's a native scrollbar:
And here's the Swing equivalent:
10. The color of the focus rectangle for JButtons is incorrect.
This is obvious in the "High Contrast Black" scheme where the
border is drawn solid white instead of dashed white.
11. The color of the focus rectangle for JCheckBox and JRadioButton
objects is incorrect. In the "High Contrast Black" color scheme,
they're drawn in black instead of white.
12. The border on the popup list for a JComboBox is hard-coded to
be black in JDK 1.4.2. This makes it invisible in the "High
Contrast Black" color scheme.
13. The border on JScrollPane objects is always drawn black. This
makes the border invisible in the "High Contrast Black" color
scheme. (It's the wrong color).
14. The color of titled borders is incorrect in JDK 1.4.2. In the
"High Contrast Black" color scheme, the line is drawn
black-on-black when it should use the window text color.
15. The default background color of viewports should be that of the
component it's displaying. This color is typically the Window
color rather than ControlBackgroundColor (which is what JDK 1.4.2
uses).
16. The cell focus border for JList is incorrect. In the "High
Contrast White" color scheme, the focus border should be black,
but it's drawn gray instead.
17. JTree: The color of the lines between nodes and their children
is incorrect. In "High Contrast Black", the lines should be green,
but are drawn silver.
18. JTree: The color of the "+/-" symbol in the expansion button is
incorrect when using the "High Contrast Black" color scheme. The
box is gray when it should be green, and the "+/-" symbol is black
when it should be white.
19. JTree: The color of the focus rectangle is incorrect. In "High
Contrast Black", the rectangle is yellow when it should be green.
20. The color of the tooltip border is incorrect. It appears to be
hardcoded to black. You can see that it's wrong in the "High
Contrast Black" color scheme.
System Fonts
1. When in high-contrast mode, the font face is not selected
correctly for JLabels. It should be bold, but is not.
2. When configured to use "Large Fonts" or "Extra Large Fonts", the
default text size in a Swing program does not change. I think it
should.
Mnemonic Hiding
Windows XP has an option to "hide underlined letters for keyboard
navigation until I press the Alt key". This option is on by
default. Here's how it works in a native Win32 application: For
controls on a native dialog, the mnemonics are hidden until the
ALT key is pressed. Once the key press happens, the mnemonics are
draw, and stay drawn even after the ALT key is released.
In Swing, the underline is removed once the ALT key is released,
which is incorrect. This incorrect behavior is seen with
JCheckBox, JButton, JRadioButton, and JLabel components.
JButton
1. When a button has focus, it should be drawn with a colored border
(blue by default, or orange if the mouse is hovering over the
button). It should also have a dotted focus rectangle. This
rectangle is missing from the XP look and feel.
Here's an example of a native button with the focus:
and at 200% magnification:
and here is a JButton:
and at 200% magnification:
You may notice that the JButton is using a different font as well.
JMenuBar
1. The background color of the menu is incorrect.
Here's what it should look like:
and here's how it looks in SwingSet2
JScrollPane
1. Disabled scroll bars should draw their terminals (the arrow
buttons) using the disabled control color. Currently, they are
drawn normally.
Here's the disabled scroll bar colors, as seen in the Windows Notepad
program:
and here they are in a sample which puts a JTextArea object on a
JScrollPane:
2. The color of the arrow buttons on scroll bars is supposed to
change when you click on them. The Swing scroll bars do not do
this. In fact, native scroll bar buttons have 3 states, each with
their own colors:
Unpressed (no mouse):
When the mouse is over the button:
When the mouse button is pressed: (same as unpressed)
3. The scrollbars on a scrollpane should not be in the tab order. For
example, if a JList is on a JScrollPane, and you press the TAB key
while the JList has focus, the focus moves to the JScrollBar. This
is NOT the way native Windows applications behave.
JTable
1. The table header height is too small.
Compare the height of the header as seen in Windows Explorer window:
to that of the table header in the TableExample3 program from JDK1.4.2:
2. The table header does not have rollover colors
Here's an example of a native header drawn with the rollover colors
showing for the "Type" field.
3. The row height does not change when the system font is set to a
large font ? You can test this by configuring Windows to use
"Extra Large Fonts".
4. The text color is ControlText by default. This should be
windowText. You can check this by setting the Windows Desktop's
"WindowText" color to blue, then look at any table (e.g. in
Windows Explorer).
JTabbedPanes
1. The selection color (the orange bar) is not shown when mousing
over tabs. The orange highlight should be on the selected tab, and
also on the tab under the mouse.
You can see this by opening the "Display Properties" dialog (right-click
on the Windows desktop and click the "Properties" menu item), then
roll the mouse over the tabs (without clicking).
2. The color of panels on a tab should be different from the usual
dialog color. It should be the same as the selected-tab color.
Here's an example of a native tabbed pane. The color of the tab and the
page itself is a gradient. At the top the color is (252, 252,
254); at the bottom it is (244,243,248).
And here is a tabbed pane in the SwingSet2 sample. The panel color is a
uniform (236,233,216).
3. When the selected tab has focus (the focus rectangle is drawn on
the tab text), and you press CTRL+DOWN, I believe this is supposed
to select the first focusable component on the selected page. If
the page's component is a JPanel which itself contains other
components, the focus will be set to the JPanel. This is useless.
The JPanel is NOT in the focus traversal cycle, so it makes no
sense to give it the focus.
This behavior appears to be caused by a poor implementation of
BasicTabbedPaneUI.requestFocusForVisibleComponent, which does not
check if the visible component is in the focus traversal cycle.
4. Pressing CTRL+PAGEUP while a control on a JTabbedPane page has
focus should select the next page and put focus to the first
focusable component (which must be in the focus traversal cycle)
on the newly selected page. Currently, pressing CTRL+PAGEUP does
nothing unless the JTabbedPane itself has focus.
Similarly, pressing CTRL+PAGEDOWN should select the previous page.
JComboBox
1. The margin of the editor in a JComboBox is too small.
Compare the width of white space to the left of the text from SwingSet2:
and a the corresponding white space from Window' "Display Properties"
dialog:
JTextArea
The default margin is 0 pixels. It should have the same margin as
a JTextField.