Experiences with Matisee
The honeymoon is over. Here are a few observations about Matisee.
The first panel was a sort of header on sidebar (see above). The layout actually worked fine on my development machine, but when I tried it under Windows the header was too large. Free Design/Matisee probably wasn’t made with the use case in mind. But it works great with forms.
The second panel is a Mac-style about box (see left; click to see larger image). When I tried to emulate this, I noticed free design does not have a way to align to the center of components. But wait, it does not need to (for this example anyway). Anchor the sides of all the labels to the edges of the panel and set the label’s horizontal alignment to center. It then works the way I want. Hmm, sometimes researching a blog entry helps my code.
Incidentally, it seems the Java HTMLKit doesn’t like meta tags. The first line of the body would never take on the correct font or boldness with the meta tags in the HTML.
I was going to put a third dialog here. But it turns out, that Matisee was not the problem. I had an options dialog that I converted from GridBag by pullling it apart and then adding a brand new check box. The new check box would not align correctly. After some work, I found the problem was all the old components had insets and the new check box did not. The problem I was going to write about here was that even after fixing the insets, the check box wasn’t aligned on Windows, but was on OS X. In doing research for this post, I looked at the “.form” file and found the problem. When searching for inset problem, I gave the check box an empty border while the rest had the default border. So it was my fault after all.