Swing UI does not have native OS look

Question

I am building an application in java swing and I am using the following code to give the UI a native OS look

try {
  UIManager.setLookAndFeel(
    UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());
  } catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

On a OS X, the look is fine, but on windows (XP and 7) the buttons look like this.

alt text http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/8735/buttonsoc.png

I have used this exact same code on other projects and it works fine. But in this particular project I get a completely different look.

I am using Java 1.6

Thanks in advance!

Stacy

What version of Java are you using? – Weiser

What you have posted should work, Have you looked at java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/lookandfeel/… ? – Bubb

@Romain - That is where I got the code from and it worked before. Now surprisingly its giving a different look. I also tested it on different systems with the same result. – Stacy

Is it failing and printing a stack trace? If you remove the try-catch, you might see an error that would illuminate the issue. – Ulda

@Virat Kadaru I am assuming that you must be overriding the settings elsewhere. It is the only thing that makes sense. Do you have anything on the command line ? How about doing a search on UIManager to see if you modify it elsewhere – Bubb

Answer 1

Are you possibly creating your GUI elements before actually setting the L&F? If you already created (e.g.) JButton instances and called methods on them, they allocate their UI peer - changes to the L&F after that won't affect the already created instances.

This would explain why it works on Mac (the L&F defaults to Mac on Apple's JVM IIRC), but not on Windows. You can test this quickly if you move setting the L&F directly into your main method as the very first call (this assuming your main class does NOT contain any statically initialized GUI instances of course).

Chockablock

Thanks! That was it. You save me a lot of pain. – Stacy