I just want to talk about one library called Steel Series lib, but conversations would be short. Because a whole information about this library you could find from the author’s web blog. The primary goal of this library is to provide a gauge components set with customized UI and additional parameters, that we may change through open API.

Some of these parameters are:

1. Frame design;

2. Background color;

3. Lcd color on appropriate gauges;

4. Pointer color on Radial gauges family;

5. Bar graph color on gauges with bar graph indicator family;

6. Values color on Linear gauges family;

7. you may set a Threshold property to enable the led blinking to signalize what an arrow position is greater than the threshold property value;

8. you may set the min. and max. measured property with very obvious definition, described by properties name;

9. Section with appropriate color;

10. Track section;

11. mmmm…. and many, many more!

Why I should worry about that?

Really, you should not worry about that, if you don’t worry about how your application looks like. Just implement your model, controller and use a standard view with standard look and feel (or maybe some of the boring look and feels. I don’t mean all of them!). However, perhaps, you’re working on some application, that is checking a significant data from the external sensors. Of course, the data checking is your part of work and very significant part. Therefore, you don’t want to spend your time to create a view for your gauges! And here they are – Steel Series lib pleasantly comes into the action. You don’t worry, you just use it.

Oh, sure. There is not only for this purpose. Perhaps, your goal is one of amazing scientific applications in any of science ways and you need to show a parameters from the sensors. Again, a gauges view is ready, we only need to spend some time and our genius ideas in a substance!
Anyone can imagine a much more interesting solutions here with any ideas that you have.

I only can imagine the scientific or industrial type of applications with gauges.  Maybe I’m wrong and just forgot something…

And what is the aim of this post?

Well, the goal is simple. I just tried to implement a simple demo, those use the Steel Series library and this is my attempt to show to anybody, who is interested in → how to use that library.

“My attempt” I pushed here in my GitHub repository. Project name – SteelSeriesDemo. You might find a source code and pre-compiled jar file in this repository.

For any additional information about library and all list of supported features, please, take a look at the author’s web blog, there you could find many useful links and contact information (if you want to ask a question directly to the author).

Oh, yes! I’m using the latest snapshot of jdk7 and everything was tested on jkd6.10+. As an addition, the demo is dependents not only on SteelSeries.jar, but and on Triden, and JGoodies forms too. I hope you’ll enjoy this lib as I am.

Conclusion

Thanks to Gerrit Grunwald for this wonderful library!