Second Session at JavaZone at 2006

The first session I attended to was the Java Effective Reloaded with Joshua Block. It was packed, so I had to stay in the back. Anyways, I got a picture of what it was all about.

I have allays been fond of GUI development, both web and standalone, although I have never done to much work on GUI's during projects, mostly on my spare time.

I am currently attending the First Aid for Swing by the founder of JGoodies, Karsten Lentzcsh. Karsten is guiding us through the process of doing a project where you have inexperienced developers, no time for usability design and the customer want pay for anything. Cool what a pragmatic attitude, this is how it works in most cases :-)

There are a lot of dos and dont's in developing swing applications. One if to use consistent colors and allays to use native fonts, simply because the render better. Karsten often does a test on applications with excessive use of borders by imagining that the GUI is a physical three dimensional artifact and by drawing the fingernails over this artifact, does it make any sound? "Rattcchhhhhhhhh" not good, to many borders, good tip? :-)

Are your GUI application symmetric? It should be, use gradients and weights to achieve symmetry across the interface, subtle but effective!. Use to three, maybe five fonts at a maximum as a guideline. I guess a lot of this concepts applies to GUI's in general, not only to swing applications.