Developers guide

In order to support skins downloaded from [ 36], as well as those I have extended to include

additional characters, Skins are loaded by matching only those that are discovered in the zip file.

8.4.2 TextSkin zip format

TextSkins can be loaded from any zip file containing a collection of gif images complying with

the naming conventions detailed below:

• All files must be in the root path of the zip file.

• Zip files must be named using <SkinName>.zip

• Each image in the zip file must be of the form

<IdentStr><SkinName>.gif

where icon<IdentStr> is variable name within TextSkin.java

• These <IdentStr> are NOT case sensitive, this is a weakness due to

Java's ZipFile implementation not distinguishing case.

As each file within the zip file is processed, it's name is identified and it is then matched to a

variable within the TextSkin object using the Java Reflection API.

This allows TextSkin zip files to support any number of characters. As a minimum, a TextSkin should

provide a default<SkinName>.gif which will be returned by getImageIcon(char

character) when the correct image is not supplied. If default<SkinName>.gif is not

supplied, a global default image will be returned. As the global default image is likely to be of a

different size and appearance to the current skin, it is likely to produce a non uniform output.

A sample listing of a <SkinName>.zip file is shown in Appendix F.4.1.

8.5 SkinnedTextFieldDemo

This is a simple application designed both to test the features of the SkinnedTextField framework

and provide example code to guide other developers wishing to include SkinnedTextField in their

applications.

It contains two SkinnedTextFields, the first displays the text from the JTextField above it, while the

second shows the currentTimeMillis()

updated approximately every 100ms.

This is the number of miliseconds since 12am, Jan 1 1970