Steel all over...

To be honest i named the library SteelSeries because i like brushed metal and most of the things made of stainless steel have that brushed look.

Not long ago i found the website of Jerry Huxtable who did an amazing job in creating lots of stuff related to image manipulation (my recommendation if you ever need some image filters etc. take a look at his page and you will find it).
I forgot to mention that all his stuff is done in Java...

So there was no reason to not integrate something like a brushed metal background to the components right...and here we go:

Well to be honest i was not sure if this is not too much metal but finaly decided to add it to the library so now it's up to you if you like to use it or not.
The background is called BRUSHED_METAL and is available to nearly all components (even the additional ones except Radar component).

As you can see some components benefit from the new background and others do not.


Keep in mind that you could add your own background to all of these components as long as it is of the type java.awt.Paint.


Second thing i added is only affecting the linear components, it's a new flag called "StartingFromZero". This means that if your horizontal linear gauge has a range e.g. from -50 to 50 and the value is -20 the bar will fill the area from the left side to -20 like on the next screenshot.

But there are scenarios where you want the value to start always from zero, e.g. a g-force meter. In this case the bar should fill the area from -20 to 0. To achieve this you have to set the StartFromZero property to true and you will get this...

In a static image that doesn't look very special but if you see it in action it really looks different like i would like to visualize with this little video...







That's it so far, if you have any ideas of new gauges etc. please do not hesitate to contact me...