SubArctic is a new Java(tm)-based user interface toolkit under development by Scott Hudson and Ian Smith at the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center at Georgia Institute of Technology.

SubArctic is not yet another AWT widget set. It is a complete, full- functioned, industrial strength toolkit designed to be used for all your user interface needs. SubArctic is based on 10 years of toolkit research and is designed to offer the advanced interface techniques needed to go beyond static interfaces and simple collections of widgets.

SubArctic is highly extensible and supports a number of sophisticated effects not available in other toolkits (and provides the basic infrastructure to build much more). Specific features include:

• Support for sophisticated drawing effects which can be applied to all interface elements,
• Animation support based on a high level path model with controlled timing and support for effects such as slow-in/slow-out, anticipation and follow through, etc.,
• Facilities for semantic snapping interactions,
• Provisions for standard and custom interactor (widget) styles that can be switched dynamically,
• Support for semantic lens interactions,
• A full-functioned interactor library with the customary buttons, check-boxes, sliders, etc., as well as more sophisticated interface composition techniques supporting dragging, snapping, lenses, and animation, all of which can be mixed with and added to other techniques,
• New techniques to support interactive debugging of interfaces,
• A built-in, efficient, and easy to use constraint evaluator for support of flexible dynamic layout,
• A well developed, and carefully designed infrastructure for extensibility at all levels, and
• The system is available free.

The pre-release version of subArctic has already been in use by programmers at Xerox PARC, Sun Microsystems, DEC Systems Research Lab, and NTT Labs (this does not, however, indicate any sort of endorsement by those places, just use by a particular individual there).

As a service to the community, we are making subArctic available with full source code free for all uses (except reselling the toolkit itself). In particular, you may use subArctic to develop commercial interfaces and distribute .class files from its library as a part of those products. See the usage policy page for complete details.

If you find subArctic useful, we would appreciate it if you would spread the word. See the logos page for details.

A number of demonstrations of things that we think you will agree are not found in other toolkits can be found on the demonstration page.

Note: Most major Java platforms still have quite a few bugs at this point. We are sorry to say that we have not yet found work arounds for all these. In particular, subArctic is only partially functional under Netscape 3.0 on the Macintosh, but is fully functional under MetroWerks CodeWarrior 11, and success has also been reported with CodeWarrior 10 as well as Macintosh Runtime for Java. We hope to be able to resolve these problems in the future through a combination of platform bug fixes and workarounds.

SubArctic is now in its second public beta release (the "St. Paul" release of version 0.8e). The St. Paul release can be obtained from the current release download page. We believe that the majority of API changes are now behind us, but we do expect the API to change somewhat based on user feedback and planned enhancements.

Substantial documentation including a 62 page user's manual and complete API documentation is available. See the documentation page for details.

subarctic-announce

Moderated group for announcements only. We have been keeping traffic on this list very light, and we highly recommend that everyone interested in the toolkit subscribe to this list so you get announcements of new releases.

subarctic-discuss (subarctic-discuss@cc.gatech.edu)

General group for discussion of subArctic issues between users.

To subscribe (or unsubscribe) to either of these lists, send mail to majordomo@cc.gatech.edu. The body of this message should contain lines with command such as: "subscribe subarctic-announce" (the subject of the message is ignored). Majordomo will send you a help message listing commands if you send it a message containing the line "help" in the body.

Bug Reports (subarctic-bugs@cc.gatech.edu)
Send bug reports and design comments to the subarctic-bugs list.

Known Problems and Planned Directions

As indicated above, subArctic does not yet have work arounds for bugs and inconsistencies on some platforms.

Additional known problems and future plans are discussed here.