More fun with JavaFX
A year ago almost to this very day I built my very first JavaFX application. It was written using JavaFX 1.0 and borrowed heavily from a stopwatch demo that was one of the early JavaFX samples. I kept it on my desktop to keep track of the time remaining before JavaOne 2009, which at the time was the center of our universe at work.
With each major subsequent event, like the launch of JavaFX 1.0 in December 2008 or the launch of JavaFX Mobile in February of 2009, I’d tweak the app to reflect a bit more of my understanding of JavaFX. Swing Timers gave way to use of the JavaFX Timeline. The SimpleDateFormat class, which made date manipulation easy on Java SE, isn’t supported on Java ME so to go mobile and get full benefit of JavaFX “cross screen” capabilities I had to learn to use the simpler Calendar class.
Recently, while caught in the build-up to another major upcoming event, I decided to replace the text-based digital display with something a bit more authentic. Creating a simple single digit 7-segment LED display turned out to be very easy, and within an evening I had a new JavaFX custom node I could use in my countdown timer and anywhere else for that matter.
I like the new look much better, though that could be because I’m old enough to have been fascinated by LED digital calculators and watches when they came out in the early 70’s and even found a bunch of old but working numitron devices in a storage room at college. Watching the new version gives me a NASA mission control countdown feeling, and somehow seems just right (especially for those big launches we keep doing)…
