An unrelated problem drew my attention to the Understanding Layouts in SWT article. It’s always bugged me that the many screenshots in this article are represented in JPEG format. JPEG is a lossy format that, in my humble opinion, is inappropriate for screenshots as the images end up with odd dithering that just plain bugs my eyes. So I decided to rebuild the screenshots in PNG format.
When I updated this article in 2008, rather than build and shot each image manually, I wrote a little Java program that builds and shoots all of the images automatically in one fell swoop. At the time, I couldn’t figure out where to store the code; it didn’t belong to any Eclipse project, and the way that Eclipse Corner is set up in CVS makes it an inappropriate place for Java code. At the time, I stuffed it into a private CVS server and forgot about it.
I pulled that code out today, tweaked it a bit, and regenerated the images. I think they look a lot better in PNG format.
I’ve put the code into a repository on GitHub if you’re interested. I’m not sure if it’s a great example of how to bend SWT to your will, but there is a little trickery in there that gets the job done.
Oh… and some food for the trolls: SWT is way better than Swing. FWIW, I haven’t looked at Swing in years; what do I know?
