If memory serves me correct, what you are suggesting did eventually work. And Quaqua got us 95% of the way there. It was only a few other things that we couldn’t resolve.

It’s a great product, don’t get me wrong, we just couldn’t get to where we needed. For example, if memory serves me correct, we had problems with auto-complete combo box where half of the text was overlapped with the combo box (the bottom half was missing). Or something like that…

If you’re interested in a very short contract job to help us resolve these final issues resolved, please contact me directly by email. I’d also be more than happy to showcase it here on this blog if we end up using it.

> So for example, if we set a background color of light blue on a panel (or
> component), it seems to ignore this and apply it’s own Look and Feel.

Quaqua sets most of the components to non-opaque. That’s why setting the background color has no visual effect.

To show the desired background color, you can either call setOpaque(true) on the component, or you can set the default settings of Quaqua to opaque, using the system property “Quaqua.opaque” to true: System.setProperty(“Quaqua.opaque”,”true”);

We could, but then it would no longer have the same polished look that we strive for. As well, it would take away from one of our principle differentiators, which is to be the “Easiest”…

Can’t you just put the controls inside a scrolling pane? Its not ideal – but its one solution.

Actually, it has to do with the Mac Look and Feel (through the UI Manager). They intentionally change the size of the combo boxes for the Mac UI Manager.

With this Look and Feel it can also affect the auto-fill combo box. The person in that article actually suggest the Quaqua Look and Feel because of similar issues. However when we tried it (and it did resolve all our combo box issues which means we’re on the right track), it brought forth too many other Look and Feel issues (background colors were overwritten, etc.

Thank you for the tip, but thats not really the issue we’re experiencing. You can actually do what your saying with just the following line of java code (using the character “m” because it’s the widest in almost all fonts):
jcomboBox.setPrototypeDisplayValue(“mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”);

What we’re actually look for is the ability to change the height of the jcombobox for the look and feel. If you look closely at the screenshot, it seems to take a lot more vertical space. And if you change the “Dimension”, it doesn’t really resolve it in a polished way…

If twiddling it before it is visible doesn’t work , I generally move the window offscreen, setVisible it, and do the twiddling there. If that doesn’t work, use the same process but programatically resize the container the offending element is in.

Generally, one or more of these techniques clears up the issue. They’re dirty, dirty hacks but they can be quicker than cleaning up someone’s Java implementation.

You’re correct, we’re using JGoodies. It’s a great library which we recommend.