Simple Demos

Message Box Demo is actually part of "The Magic Square". The purpose of this small program is to demonstrate the usage of different types of dialog boxes that can be incorporated into a larger program. It is clear that these dialog boxes are always needed in programs that have a user interface. After all, we are humans, humans make mistakes, and dialog boxes notify us when we err. Notice the various gif images that are used for the each type of box. Not much more can be said about "Message Box Demo" -- it really is boring. The only thing that is moderately amusing is my choice of messages for each button.<br> Before I could complete the "Message Box" class, I needed to figure out how to play audio files. That way, I could insert the "chord" sound that Windows generally uses with its dialog boxes. However, things were getting too complex. So, I started a separate program called Sound Demo to teach myself how to play these files. One thing I learned is that they need to be .au files (not .wav) to work properly on the web. Thus, a substantial amount of quality is lost in the conversion; stereo becomes mono and the 21kHz sampling rate is downgraded to 8 kHz. Also, Java sometimes causes the audio to skip as it is playing a file. Thus, I guess it's safe to say that sound is not Java's forte. Recently, I modified this program so that it can work as both an applet and an application. Completely different classes, methods, and techniques are used to get the audio files to play properly both ways. After some trial and error, I came up with the code shown in the links below. Note: Sun Microsystems does not support sun.* packages and they are not included in the Java API; however, I used them anyway because there are currently no other means of accomplishing this task.