You size an applet in the HTML page that hosts it. I find that you need to size the applet area carefully to allows your controls to be layed out as expected on the screen.The general pattern I use when user input drives the display is to have a member variable of my JApplet derived class. There is conditional logic in the paint() method that depends on this variable. When a user action changes the variable state, repaint() is called to redraw the screen.
I've been doing a lot with buttons that have no text on them. They only have an icon image on them. I have encountered some problems with transparency. I would like the button background color to bleed through any white portion of my image. However does not seem to be the default behavior of the button class. Maybe I need to set some unknown options. I hope I do not need to code or draw my own button face.
