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Re-make / Re-model

Posted by editor on July 12, 2005 at 6:53 AM PDT

Overhauling your GUI's so they make sense

Take off your developer hat for a minute, put on your user hat, and take a look at the really horrid user interfaces out there. You don't have to look far to find applications that are simply inept and downright painful to use. If you don't have any examples coming to mind, here are three different "user interface halls of shame" that collect the worst of the worst:

But how do you avoid developing a UI that, while functional, is a dud for your users? In today's
Feature Article, Interaction Happens: Thinking Graphically, Jonathan Simon says: "Making a polished user interface is hard work. Interaction design takes experience and time, which are usually inconceivable luxuries."

He begins his "holistic" study of UI's with an address detail panel you've probably seen before: each field is on its own line, with a descriptive label next to it. You could even build something like this with reflection. And it makes perfect sense... to the developer.

To the end user, the layout is arbitrary, the labels unnecessary, and the whole thing takes up more space than necessary. Moreover, the user is probably used to dealing with addresses as they'd be laid out on an envelope, business card, or rolodex card, so why not present the data that way? Jonathan's article shows you how to do this with Swing, and then moves on to other cases where thinking more visually will help you make your GUI's more effective.

In today's Weblogs.
Graham Hamilton has posted his

Slides for JavaOne Technical Keynote: "Here are the PDF slides for the JavaOne 2005 Technical Keynote. The Technical Keynote is our attempt to provide a high level overview of the roadmaps and big directions for the core Java platform."

In Rethinking web development, or "Will I be spending the rest of my life writing JavaScript"?, Will Iverson asks: "If 'real developers' write code for the server, but Ajax means we are writing tightly coupled presentation tiers... who exactly is supposed to be writing and maintaining all of that DHTML and JavaScript? How do we get out of this mess?"

Bruce Boyes reports on Sandia Labs: UWB & AES demo for next generation secure wireless networks:
"Sandia develops secure wireless technology using AES and UWB. A recent test moved streaming video over such a link, using only microwatts (compared to milliwatts for 802.11b/g) of RF power. Sounds almost too good to be true..."

In Also in
Java Today ,

JSF is a framework built upon Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs) technologies to provide a better Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. Since its release, JSF is gaining momentum in the web development community. The Apache Software Foundation has jumped on board also and has created their own open source implementation of JSF, called MyFaces. MyFaces provides much more than just a fully compliant implementation of JSF. The article Apache MyFaces Overview takes a look at MyFaces and discuss some of the features it provides that are above and beyond what is provided by the standard reference implementation from Sun.

In part four of an interview by Bill Venners, Erich Gamma talks about Patterns and Practice. The co-author of Design Patterns describes how design patterns are problem solution pairs, how design patterns help you understand intent and tradeoffs, and how to become a better designer through practice.

In Projects and
Communities,
the Java Distributed Data Acquisition and Control project has released version 0.5 of its JDDAC platform. The new release includes improved J2ME and metadata support, and is the version used by the NetBEAMS project.

The Mac Java Community's Mac Java FAQ Project seeks to collect "answers, information, and how-to's for Mac Java development", compiling information from developer mailing lists and other sources. Most of this new project's content thusfar is contained in its wiki FAQ.

In today's Forums,
sahu is trying to figure out what's meant by chmod in Mustang:
"While talking about Mustang, Graham Hamilton (at JavaOne) presented one slide with everything that is planned for Java SE6. I immediately spotted 'chmod'. Does anybody know what this exactly means? Is it for file permissions? Is it actually planned for Mustang? Or is it just there to fill up the slide and has no major impact on Mustang?"

peter_lawrey has an idea for a Named interface:
"I suggest having a Named interface that returns a unique identifier as a String. This is a simple interface which I use all the time and many class in the standard libraries have a getName() method already. Here are some of the classes where such a method is already defined..."

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Overhauling your GUI's so they make sense

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