In this tutorial, I will show you how to quickly manage screens using the RIM UI API. The BlackBerry OS maintains a stack of screens, and your app can be pushed and popped from this stack. These are normal screen display operations. You can even hide your screen from the display, and it will show the BlackBerry home screen. You can close the screen as well.

Using Task API to perform HTTP POST operation in the background, while monitoring the request and response I/O operation data streams.

More details on the Task API introduced in the first Task API tutorial. SampleApp from the first tutorial is dissected under a microscope along with the API itself. Also contains information on which external libraries are optional and which are required.

Introducing the Task API. Easy to use background task API for Swing. Android and JavaME implementation coming soon. Easily create tasks and monitor their progress and cancel them at any time. Easily manage multiple tasks. Create network aware tasks and recurring tasks, and much much more! The API is open source (Apache 2.0 license). Enjoy!!!

This tutorial will show you how to use SwingX’s JXBusyLabel component to display an indeterminate progress indicator. It will also show you advanced configuration options that allow you to create different and interesting indeterminate progress indicators using the BusyPainter.

This tutorial will walk you through the steps required to use JXTaskPane and JXTaskPaneContainer in SwingX. You will learn how to change the default color schemes of these components, and add components and actions to task panes.

This tutorial will introduce you to the SwingX API and the concept of Painters. It will give you an idea of the kinds of effects you can create with them as well, with code examples.

This tutorial outlines some of the interesting behaviors exhibitied by SwingWorker when running background tasks are cancelled in flight.

I needed to perform animations in the app that I’m building (http://screamingtoaster.com). I needed to build animations that show a transition from one screen to another. This is slightly different than creating custom, or modified components which perform a function and have a set of graphical effects. I needed animations that would transition my user interface from one “screen” to the next. The screens themselves could be panels or components (part of the whole app, or the entire app itself). While I’d been writing much of this code myself, to do these animations, it just got really tedious and frustrating to add this level of complexity to my code, when all I needed were some simple animations. I’ve been using the SwingX API and the TimingFramework API to perform the animations and leverage the components, however, this last piece was missing. And this last piece just got delivered by Chet Haase, as a part of the binary deliverables with his (and Romain Guy’s) great book – Filthy Rich Clients.

I needed to perform animations in the app that I’m building (http://screamingtoaster.com). I needed to build animations that move various components around on the screen, and other animations that pop up components on top of existing components, etc. After creating a few of these effects, I realized that I was doing the same thing over and over again, which is why I decided to write this tutorial to encapsulate this pattern, in the hopes that I will help others doing the same thing.

If you’ve ever want to incorporate web services into your graphical applications/applets/widgets written in Java, then there are some threading issues that you have to be mindful of, and design around. This tutorial will guide you though some of the important threading issues you have to keep in mind when building such applications. The strategies outlined in this tutorial apply to accessing more than just web services from Swing apps; it also applies to loading information from databases, and performing any other kind of time consuming process that has to happen in the desktop app and interact with it, but can’t make the user interface unresponsive.