Live From Tokyo : Extreme UI Makeover - A Great Talk on Developing Powerful Desktop Apps
posted Tuesday, 8 November 2005
| Hans Muller and Scott Violet presented on the topic of Extreme GUI Makeover. This session was about powerful rich client applications. When I say powerful I mean that they take a mundane low performing app and they make it into a high performing interesting app. The scope of the talk is about Java2D and Swing |  | classes. They showed a chat application in its simplest form. Then they surveyed existing IM applications and then they begin looking at changing their app's Login, Buddy List and Chat windows. The initial IM application is indeed mundane and simple. The simple chat login window is transformed into a much more useable and aesthetic login window. |
 Romain Guy's Blog Explains StackLayout and Compositing to create the Account (Avatar) Chooser and the math behind it | For starters, they used ListCellRenderers to display the list with a different color for even and odd rows and they show avatars for each account. They show that even for simple applications it is important to be able to do everything from the keyboard usiing mnemomics. They also talked about localization using ResourceBundles and locales. Also Hans discussed BIDI which allows right-to-left and left-to-right text flow. So in some languages - right justified text makes sense. So they created a usable login window and then they showed an extreme (meaning an even more imaginative improvement) login window which was phenomenal. The extreme makeover uses Java2D and Swing custom layout | to build avatars that you can cycle through. The illusion of 3D look is a bit of a trick - making the avatars on the edges the smallest and the one in the middle the largest. By using compositing it is also possible to create reflections. Scott showed how to change the Buddy List to make it more interesting Scott then showed the transformation of the app so that avatars,drag-and-drop are added and also the status of each buddy. The overall look was much better. Scott showed how using a custom TreeCellRenderer can give list groups a really different look, paint the appropriate buddy for for each icon and much more. The extreme version of the Buddy List similarly shows some very nice animated tricks using buddy groups. The Chat Window was also overhauled and what was created showed avatars that display message text coming avatars on the left and right (a dialog in this case between two). The talk was quite effective in showing how far Swing has come both in creating and displaying aesthetically pleasing UIs that take a backseat to no other toolkit. The original claims of the creators of SWT are now lost in the avalanche of a rapidly advancing Swing UI toolkit that has blurred performance comparisons and shown itself to be superior at creating advanced user interfaces.. The recent Evans survey that shows Swing as the dominant UI toolkit (even over Microsoft WinForms) further illustrates the serious problem for a competing toolkit like SWT - it has simply lost its relevancy and the lack of lots and lots of applications (after four years) has further marginalized it to the niche of a creating Eclipse plugins. Hans Muller and Scott Violet really provided a great talk - the latest version of the talk will be online shortly - in the meantime you can see the earlier version of the talk here.
Note Hans Muller has posted a Brief Report from JavaOne Japan here. | 
The Buddy List (Extreme Version) | Updated : Some examples of Extreme Swing GUIs can be found at Aerith's site and a great example from TidalWave that uses the NetBeans Platform. Updated : You can listen and view the presentations from JavaOne 2006 on Extreme GUI Makeover Lookin' Better and Filthy Rich Clients : Animated Effects in Swing Applications and Deployment Tips and Tricks Using Java Web Start and Java Plugin. Updated : There is a bit of Swing envy in SWT-land happening and they would like to see Extreme SWT - but the results are something else - Note Romain Guy's comment. The example of Extreme SWT can be viewed here - I leave it to the viewer to compare and contrast Aerith and TidalWave to the SWT example . |
links: digg this del.icio.us technorati
