Toni Epple's Blog

Kirill Grouchnikov’s has announced the Substance 4.2 official release. There’s also an updated version of the NetBeans plugin available from here.

If you do RCP development, this could be an extremely useful plugin for you. At the Sun Tech Days in Frankfurt I did a session about the NetBeans platform. One topic that came up twice during the discussion was how to create applications that don’t look like NetBeans or like an IDE. Well, it’s possible, look at Blue Marine, but how do you do it? First thing you can do is strip down the platform to the most basic modules, that removes most of the toolbars and menus. Next you can do some branding, replace icons and actively hide toolbars and menus you don’t want to show ( I’ll show how this in one of my next blog entries ). But the most “substancial” change can be made by using this plugin, and it’s the easiest part also. Add it to your application and you can have a totally different look and feel with lot’s of nice effects.

Here’s a very basic example:

Before

After

Update: Since there were questions how you can add the module to your own suite I’ve added some information here 

and -if you like that- you can even have Butterfly shaped buttons :).