Quaqua Look and Feel

Read Me

Purpose

The Quaqua Look and Feel (Quaqua) is a user interface library for Java applications which wish to closely adhere to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines for Mac OS X.

Quaqua is not a fully self-contained look and feel. It runs on top of Apple's Aqua Look and Feel, and provides fixes and enhancements for it.

Features

• (Nearly) Native User Experience

Quaqua user interface delegates closely look and behave like their native counterparts. Complex user interface components, such as JFileChooser and JColorChooser, are close enough to make end users feel comfortable with them.

• Blend into OS X Designs

Quaqua supports three OS X designs: Tiger, Panther, Jaguar. Quaqua automatically chooses the right design for the current operating system.

• Alternative Styles

Quaqua offers alternative styles for many user interface elements. Such as small styles for most of the components, as well as a striped style for tables, lists and trees. Jaguar-design like tabbed panes with stacking tabs are also supported.

• Additional Components
  Quaqua provides Swing implementations of NSBrowser and NSSheet (named JBrowser and JSheet).
• Clean Layout

Laying out Aqua components with Java is quite challenging. Quaqua provides an API for component alignment based on visual criteria (baseline, visual bounds, preferred gaps). JScrollPane's automatically avoid overlaps with the grow-boxes of windows.
 

• Localized in four languages
  Quaqua is localized in the following languages: German, French, Italian and English.

License Fee

The Quaqua Look and Feel is free of a charge for commercial and non-commercial use.

If you want to honour my work on this project, send a bottle of good wine to me.

System Requirements

The Quaqua Look and Feel runs on Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.4. It works with Apple's Macintosh Runtime For Java (MRJ) supporting J2SE 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5.

Some features only work with J2SE 1.4 and later, some only with J2SE 1.5.

Access to the Carbon and Cocoa API is required for the FileChooserUI and OptionPaneUI. The corresponding native libraries support PowerPC and Intel Macs. Quaqua will work without these native libraries, but the user experience may degrade.

For development purposes only, Quaqua can be run on non-Mac OS X systems too.

Copyright

Quaqua Look And Feel © 2003-2006

Werner Randelshofer, Staldenmattweg 2, Immensee, CH-6405, Switzerland
http://www.randelshofer.ch/
werner.randelshofer@bluewin.ch
All Rights Reserved.

Third Party Libraries

• NanoXML © 2000-2002
  Marc De Scheemaecker
  All Rights Reserved.
• Base64 ©
  Robert Harder
• Swing-Layout
  Sun Microsystems
  https://swing-layout.dev.java.net/
  All Rights Reserved.

Contributors

• Christopher Atlan
• Karl von Randow
• Bjorn Roche
• Steve Roy

Artwork

The artwork used by the Quaqua Look and Feel is copyright Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. Use of the artwork is only licensed for Apple hardware running an Apple operating system.