Question

I have run into yet another issue with my program. I have made several JButton sub-classes to do specifically what I need them to do. The problem is that the buttons don’t show up until I either click where they are supposed to be or if I hover the mouse over them (when I had setRolloverEnabled() to true). I originally had them all set for setRolloverEnabled() to true. But I understood that when I did hover the mouse over top of them, it had an ugly blue outline of the button which I didn’t like at all. So is there any way to make them visible without having to hover over them, or without having to click them?

I have a background on my JFrame (I sub-classed JPanel and overrode the paintComponent() method) allowing JFrame to maintain its role as a container). Also in Adobe Photoshop I have designed the buttons and on the outer edge it has some transparency, I saved the files as .png so the transparency would be kept, but when the buttons are placed in the frame, there is an ugly blue outline still where it should be transparent. Any help on that.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Below is the code for one of my Button classes.

public class Button extends javax.swing.JButton {  
//This Button class is not the AWT Button object. 
//It is a custom class designed by me.

    public Button(ImageIcon normal){

        setRolloverEnabled(false);
        setVisible(true);
        setIcon(normal);
        setSize(normal.getIconWidth(),normal.getIconHeight());

    }

    public Button(ImageIcon normal, ImageIcon rollover){

        this(normal);
        setRolloverIcon(rollover);

    }

    public Button(ImageIcon normal, ImageIcon rollover,ImageIcon selected){

        this(normal,rollover);
        setSelectedIcon(selected);

    }

}

Answer 1

There is a good chance you are not creating your GUI in the Event Dispatch Thread. Swing painting is single threaded by design. If you try to draw your components (even if you dont do it on purpose), the results will be varied. There are well documented methods to properly instruct the jvm to paint your components, including SwingWorker and SwingUtilities.invokeLater(Runnable). Take a look at this tutorial to get more info.