Creating an animated 4x4 grid in Java
I need to create a 4 x 4 grid of rectangles in Java, I then need these rectangles to change color in a sequence.
I've never done any graphical work before, just things in the console.
I started by doing some research and created a 650 x 650 JFrame
to put the rectangles in.
After that I used GridLayout
and managed to create a 4 x 4 grid out of buttons using window.JButton
which wasn't right.
How would I create rectangles instead? And would it be right to use for loops with ++ to time the animation?
I couldn't find anything that worked for my needs when searching on stackoverflow and google. Sorry if this is a stupid question. I'm new to this and I'm doing for an apprecticeship.
Here's how I would like it to look like, with each rectangle changing color in a time interval
Solution 1:
From @Eng.Fouad answer (so give him credit and upvote his answer too), I made some changes, this example shows how to use a Swing Timer which changes color every second from green to red. I'm using a simple JLabel
for demonstration purposes, take this logic into the GridLayout
you have:
Here are some screen shots on how it looks:
import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.awt.Color;
import javax.swing.BorderFactory;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;
import javax.swing.Timer;
public class SimpleTimer extends JFrame
{
private JLabel label;
private Timer timer;
private int counter = 3; // the duration
private int delay = 1000; // every 1 second
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
private Color c = Color.RED;
private boolean red = true;
private boolean stop = false;
int i = counter;
public SimpleTimer()
{
super("Simple Timer");
setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
label = new JLabel("Wait for " + counter + " sec", JLabel.CENTER);
JPanel contentPane = (JPanel) getContentPane();
contentPane.add(label, BorderLayout.CENTER);
contentPane.setBorder(BorderFactory.createEmptyBorder(5, 5, 5, 5));
pack();
timer = new Timer(delay, action);
timer.setInitialDelay(0);
timer.start();
setVisible(true);
}
ActionListener action = new ActionListener()
{
@Override
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event)
{
if(i == 0)
{
timer.stop();
stop = true;
i = counter;
timer = new Timer(delay, action);
timer.setInitialDelay(0);
timer.start();
}
else
{
c = red ? Color.GREEN : Color.RED;
red = !red;
label.setBackground(c);
label.setOpaque(true);
label.setText("Wait for " + i + " sec");
i--;
}
}
};
public static void main(String[] args)
{
SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable()
{
@Override
public void run()
{
new SimpleTimer();
}
});
}
}