Closing windows in style

This week some fun stuff!

In the post about dialog with drop shadow i mentioned the class WindowFadeInManager to open or close a window with a fadein / fadeout effect, but there is another way to close window in style.

First, don’t make me say what I didn’t, such close transitions should not be used on every windows in your app, if you do it will just annoy the user.
I usually use them to close loading/splash/main frame of an application.



The base class where all the main work is done is
CloseTransition , it’s an abstract class where the only abstract method is

protected abstract void paintImage(Graphics g,float animFraction);

This method is responsible of drawing the closing window for a given animation fraction (from 0 to 1)

The CloseTransition class take care of making a screenshot of the actual window that will get closed. Then it starts the close animation.

So what to do in this paintImage method?
One easy thing is to show that a window is closing via shapes. For example simply by making the window shrink.

This is done by extending the ShapeTransition class.
This class has one abstract method:

public abstract Shape getShape(float animFraction);

This method will get called to set the clip before painting the image of the closing window. There is also an option to automaticly shrink the image of the closing screen.
So to create a close transition, this method will have to return an empty shape when animFraction=1 and a shape that cover totally the original window when animFraction=0

By default in the ShapeTransition the original window is painted with an alpha value of 1-animfraction to make the window disappear smoothly, you can change this behaviour by setting the fadeout property to false.

In the repository you will find the following implementation of close transitions:
ShrinkTransition
CircleTransition
RectanglesTransition (the one I use in my apps)
FadeOutTransition
RotationTransition
PinchTransition, the funniest one, only work well on small window


To start a close transition you can follow this example:

myFrame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.DO_NOTHING_ON_CLOSE);
myFrame.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() {
@Override
public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
RectanglesTransition transition = new RectanglesTransition(myFrame);
transition.startCloseTransition();
}
});

By default the action at the end of the transition is system.exit(0); because those close transitions are meant to be used to close main frame of an application but anyway you can set the end action:

transition.setEndAction(AbstractAction);