Okay, here’s my blog post, mimicking the style you described.
Alright folks, lemme tell ya about this little side project I tackled – gettin’ a swingin’ logo goin’. It all started ’cause I was bored, plain and simple.
So, first thing’s first, I needed a logo. Luckily, I had one lyin’ around from an old project. Nothing fancy, just a simple shape. I fired up my trusty IDE – IntelliJ, ’cause VS Code just wasn’t cuttin’ it for Java this time. Created a new Java project, named it “SwingLogo”, real original, I know.
Then came the fun part – actually building the GUI. I started with a JFrame, the main window. Stuck a JPanel in there, that’s where the magic was gonna happen. I overwrote the paintComponent() method of my panel, ’cause that’s where you draw stuff in Swing, duh. Figured out how to load my logo image – turns out ImageIO is your friend here. Got the image read in and ready to go.
Next up: the swing. I needed to make that logo move back and forth. My first thought was a Timer. Created a Timer, set it to fire every few milliseconds. In the timer’s action listener, I updated the logo’s angle. Simple trig – sine wave – to make it swing smoothly. Added a little damping, so it wouldn’t swing forever. Spent a good hour tweaking the numbers until the swing looked natural.
Then came the gotchas! The logo was swingin’ alright, but it was all jerky and weird. Turns out, Swing is single-threaded, and I was hogging the main thread with my painting. The fix? *(). Wrapped my drawing code in that, and BAM! Smooth as butter.
But wait, there’s more! The background was white, and that looked kinda boring. So I threw in a gradient background. Used GradientPaint, drew a rectangle covering the whole panel. Made the colors change subtly to add some visual interest.
Finally, I packaged it all up into a JAR file. Double-clicked it, and there it was: my logo, swingin’ away on a nice gradient background. Not gonna lie, felt pretty good seeing it all work. It’s not gonna win any design awards, but it was a fun little project.
So yeah, that’s how I spent my weekend. Messing around with Swing, making a logo swing. Learned a few things, scratched an itch. Now, back to the real work…
- Started with a JFrame and JPanel.
- Loaded the logo image using ImageIO.
- Used a Timer and sine wave to create the swing animation.
- Fixed the jerkiness with *().
- Added a gradient background for extra flair.
Pretty simple stuff, but hey, gotta start somewhere.
