Have you seen those beautifull user interfaces on the macintosh? Oh sure they don't have a backspace key but you can't deny the fact that those 'tv lined' backgrounds on the UIs look really good.
I wanted to create such UIs with java swing on other platforms as well. So having armed myself with 4x1 pixel image i decided to create the following applet.
public void paintComponent(Graphics g)
{
if(paint == null)
{
try {
/* img is the background tile */
int height = img.getHeight(this);
int width = img.getWidth(this);
bim = (BufferedImage) createImage(width,height);
Graphics2D bim_g2d = (Graphics2D) bim.getGraphics();
bim_g2d.drawImage(img,0,0,Color.black,this);
paint = new TexturePaint(bim,new Rectangle(0,0,width,height));
}
catch (Exception ex) {
/* method called before bg image has been loaded */
}
}
Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D) g;
if(paint != null)
{
g2d.setPaint(paint);
g2d.fill(g2d.getClip());
}
}
The applet on the next page uses this code. As you will see it takes way too long for the background to be painted with this approach