Custom L&F with Shadow effect for Menus & Tooltips

Question

Hai friends !
I want to design a custom look and feel with shadow effect for menus
and tooltips. Pls help me....
I tried following but..
i) Extended abstract border....
ii)Extends ColorUIResource to support "alpha"
iii)setOpaque(false) in installUI() method
Event hough I used transperent color for border the underlying color of
component is displaying at the corners.

Answer 1

I don't think there's anything you can do with the Tooltips, because the only methods I see that have to do with the tooltips are setTooltipText and getTooltipText..
But, you can do transparent borders, and here's some code that shows you how to do it. This doesn't do exactly what you want, but you should be able to get there.
import javax.swing.*;      
import javax.swing.border.*;  
import java.awt.*;
public class BorderTest extends JFrame {
   JPanel panel;
   JButton buttona;
   JButton buttonb;
   public BorderTest () {
      super("BorderTest");
      panel    = new JPanel();
      buttona  = new JButton("TransBorder");
      buttonb  = new JButton("NonTransBorder");
      getContentPane().add(panel);
      panel.setLayout(new GridLayout(0, 2));
      panel.add(buttona);
      panel.add(buttonb);
      panel.setBackground(Color.red);       
      // these two buttons are both blue, but the one with the transparent
      // border ends up looking somewhat purple.
      buttona.setBorder(new TransBorder());
      buttonb.setBorder(new TransBorder(Color.blue));
      setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
      setBounds(0, 0, 300, 300);
   private class TransBorder extends AbstractBorder {    
      Color transColor;
      public TransBorder() {
         super(); 
         transColor  = new Color(0, 0, 255, 100);  // transparent blue
      public TransBorder(Color c) {
         super(); 
         transColor  = c;
      public Insets getBorderInsets(Component c) {
         return new Insets(3, 3, 3, 3);
      public Insets getBorderInsets(Component c, Insets i) {
         return getBorderInsets(c);
      public void paintBorder(Component c, Graphics g, int x, int y, int w, int h) {
         g.setColor(transColor);
         g.fillRect(x, y, w, h);
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      BorderTest bt  = new BorderTest();
      bt.setVisible(true);
}Hope this helps.
Eric