Home: www.rioaudio.com

The Rio Karma is a hand held MP3 (and Ogg Vorbis!) player with a 20G hard drive and a flashy black case. More important than that, there's a free Java application available for managing the music stored on the device called the "Rio Music Manager Lite".

As you can see from screenshots below, RRML is equally at home on the Mac, Linux, or a PC. And even more important than that, if you look closely you'll see that this app includes a "Karma Vs. IPod" Easter Egg game. You'll have to figure out how to activate that.

Thanks to RMML developer Mike Schrag (mail: mschrag @ pobox . com) for sending us a pointer to this app!

(note: click on the images for larger views)

Home: www.durius.com

Today on CNN's web site there was an intriguing story about a new personal submarine called Gemini from a company called Subeo. It seats two, cruises around and about 150 feet below the surface, and only costs $845,000 (I need to be rich).

If you check out the Subeo web site you will not find some tiresome flying logo Flash animation and a "Skip Intro" button. Instead, there's an applet that displays Gemini floating in what appears to be a tank of rippling water. This visual effect and many others have been around in Java applets for years and it occurred to me that it's high time we showcased a few here.

The applet below comes from a company called Durius. Drive your mouse over it to see some interesting effects, click on it to go to the Durius web site.

Home: www.dbvis.com/products/dbvis

We just got an email from Roger Bjärevall (mail: roger @ minq . se) reminding us that Minq Software's JDBC based DBVisualizer product has evolved quite dramatically since we last set eyes on it.

Roger is the Product Manager for DbVisualizer and you will not be surprised to learn that he also mentioned that "DBVisualizer has been tested with 17 different databases and it has been verified on Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X and Linux. More then 180,000 copies have been downloaded". We published an item about DbVisualizer back in the Sept 2001 Swing Sigthings.

The past two years have been very kind to DBVisualizer, as you can see from the screenshots below. It's grown bigger and better looking. We noticed that the Alloy Look and Feel looks splendid as always and DBVisualizer also puts icons from IconExperience to good use.

(note: click on the images for larger views)

Home: www.e-escola.pt

José Pedro Pereira sent us the following description of eLab an ReC:

"ReC - Remote Experienced Control (See here for product Leaflet in English) is a new Software Framework, based on Java, CORBA and XML to enable and ease the construction of Internet Based Data Acquisition and Robotics Control Software."

"eLab is a Remote Internet Laboratory that has 6 live experiments already assembled and working. More experiments to come in a near future - up to a total of 35... Yes! you are controlling the apparatuses equipment, which are fully automated, but No! rest assured, you can't mess it up in dangerous ways."

"You may configure the Apparatuses parameters (each with it's own configuration utility), start the experiment, fetch other people's experiments data, chat with others in the Laboratory, watch your control state, connect to live video feeds and access other resources like the experimental protocol, and much, much more."

"This project is a joint effort of EDUCARE S.A., a Portuguese company which developed ReC, and Instituto Superior Técnico, a Portuguese Engineering University, which developed the contents, idealized the experiments and assembled the automation and acquisition equipment. The eLab's basic User Interface as well as some of the specific user interface components for the experiments (based on Swing and Plugin Architecture from the beggining) and the drivers for some of the equipments where also developed by EDUCARE S.A., but there are also developers at Instituto Superior Técnico building on top of the Framework their own UI's and drivers."

Home: jawe.enhydra.org

Stefanovic Nenad (mail: chupo @ iis.ns.ac.yu) sent us a pointer to JaWE. According to the web site,

"JaWE is the first open source graphical Java workflow process editor fully according to WfMC specifications supporting XPDL as its native file format and LDAP connections. It can be used to edit & view every XPDL file which conforms to WfMC specifications."

A WorkFlow engine (server) like Enhydra Shark can carry out a workflow defined with XPDL. Along with some cooperative users ofcourse.

Home: www.landlordmax.com

Chances are that if you have something to do with rental property you have a landlord (it's who you've been sending your rent checks to). However if you are a landlord, here's an app that designed to simplify the bookeeping part of the job.

This application helps track tenants and units and properties and all of the accounting that goes along with that. And there's a free evalutation copy waiting.

Home: www.2mgames.com/flower.htm

Back in Swing Sightings #14 we featured a collection of 20 Tetris games from Bertrand Vauthier at 2M Games in France (mail: support @ 2mgames.com).

I just happened to bump into another simple beautiful 2M Game called Flower Garden, also based on J2SE 1.4 with window and full screen support. Well worth a couple of rounds. Watch out for the spiders...  :eek:

Home: www.jdistro.com

For the past year and half or so, Guillaume Desnoix has been posting updates about the JDistro project and we've been remiss for not publishing a Swing Sightings item about it.

JDistro is a complete desktop system written entirely in Java, from the window system to the web started apps. All of the apps share a single VM so JDistro doesn't have a huge footprint, and support is included for running unmodified coventional apps, applets, and web started apps. JDistro is a GPL'd open source project so if you've ever felt like having your way with the entire desktop, take a look at JDistro.

Home: www.pivotonic.com

Pivitonic is a company in Beijing staffed by "a group of Java fans" who've been building tools for Java developers. JawaBeginner enters the somewhat crowded ranks of Java IDEs. It provides support for JSP, XML, Ant, and of course pure Java development.

Home: www.quantrix.com

Quantrix is a multi-dimensional financial modeling tool. I'm not a a spreadsheet professional however it's clear that conventional spreadsheets have two dimensions and Quantrix supports N. Timothy Brooks (mail: tim @ IntegraStrategic.com) sent us a brief description of Quantrix that sums up its strengths better than I could:

"Quantrix Modeler is robust, professional-grade financial modeling software specifically designed for professionals who require functionality beyond the modeling limits of traditional desktop spreadsheets. With Quantrix Modeler, separation of logic, structure and presentation is combined with a proprietary, multidimensional calculation engine to deliver an elegant and powerful modeling tool designed for financial professionals. This delivers greater accuracy, transparency, flexibility and productivityto give better business insight, which ultimately leads to better business decisions."

Being shallow GUI toolkit guys, we were impressed by the totally custom Swing look and feel!

Home: www.genostar.org

Philippe Genouod (mail: Philippe.Genoud @ imag . fr) from Universite Joseph Fourier in France, sent a note about an interesting project called Genostar:

"Genostar's goal is to provide researchers with a bioinformatics platform for exploratory genomics; to offer a unified way of representing and managing data of various types and origins (high throughput sequencing, micro-arrays, proteomics, etc) through a set of software modules which can exchange information"

The three screenshots below are from three different Genostar applications, GenoAnnot, GenoBool, and GenoLink. We'd like to thank Phillippe for sending us brief descriptions of each app!

"GenoAnnot provides an innovative solution to the annotation of genomic sequences. It aims at the search for and identification of features, such as genes or regulatory sites, on a genomic sequence. Drawing on an explicit description of biological entities and their structures, it is able to guide the user through the choices and combinations of methods of annotation using advanced bioinformatics. The assortment of available methods is large and easily extendable. They include lexical or structural pattern
searching, Markov chains and databank screening. A dedicated interface allows the user to view the results of the analysis, to append comments and to validate them. The annotation process of a sequence can be memorized and can be played back after modifying the parameters of a particular method."

"GenoBool helps to identify correlations between sets of data of various types. To this end, it offers an interface for data manipulation and encoding as well as a set of multivariate statistical methods. For instance, GenoBool can help analyze how codons are used or how base composition bias is related to replication. Visualization tools allow the user to ascertain or disprove the hypothesis of new relationships."

"GenoLink adds to the biologist's ability to explore relationships between data by allowing him/her to link up and view a wide range of information, whether these are produced by Genostar or imported into the system. It's strength lies in the fact that it can explicitly represent and manipulate relationships between biological entities. These include similarities between genes, functional families, existence of syntenies and physical interaction between proteins. GenoLink allows the user to build advanced queries based on these relationships, and to browse the results through a powerful and intuitive interface."

Home: www.myjavaworld.com/products/jftp

Sai Pullabhotla (mail: psai @ myjavaworld . com) sent us a pointer to his free graphical FTP client, JFTP. Available as both a standalone MDI app and an applet, it supports running loads of simultaneous ftp sessions with all the trimmings.

 

Home: www.wurmonline.com

In the last week or two I've had several people drop by to show me a great looking new Java game called Wurm Online. It's what the game guys call an online MMORPG, which in laymen's terms is a "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game". It's being developed by a group called "Mojang Specifications" and it's a work in progress.

An impressive work, as you can see from the screenshots below. Better yet launch the app and take a walk around and watch the butterflys.