Question

I have a Java app whose windows and internal components have animations that could slow down a less powerful computer. I know that all OSs have some form of animation preferences (In Windows, there are check boxes for “Animate controls and elements inside windows”, in Linux, there are selections for Full, Basic, or No animations, and in OSX you can do things like enter “defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-edge-delay -float 0.0; killall Dock” or “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO” into the terminal). Is there any way to find out whether the user has animations enabled or disabled, so that I can conform to er preferences?

Answer 1

I would think, that since Java is Operating System agnostic, that there is no specific API, native or third-party, to do this (although there could be). You could use a combination of JNI and/or executing external commands and then interpret their outputs to determine if animations are enabled. To do this you would have to query the os.name system property and run the specific commands for that OS. I think this would be a fair bit of pain and you may just want to give the users an option to disable the animations.

Personally, I would prefer the option because I might turn of the OS animations because they are annoying but still may enjoy the animations in your application.