This year, JavaOne Japan is during the week of November 7th in a jaw dropping venue called Tokyo International Forum. On Tuesday Scott Violet, Josh Marianacci, and I made two presentations based on Desktop Java talks from the San Francisco JavaOne: Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 1: Lookin' Good, and Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 2: Runnin' Fast.

Sessions at JavaOne Japan are shorter, just 45 minutes, and the presentations are translated into Japanese in real-time. Before each session we met with the translators to go over technical terms and other jargon. The translators work in pairs because the job is a bit of a mental sprint, so they shift the work back and forth. They always advise us to follow two simple rules: speak slowly, pausing between slides to allow them catch up, and don't tell jokes. Not being funny just comes naturally, however it's tough to speak slowly when you're trying to cram 60 minutes of material into a 45 minute session. We tended to start out at a sensible pace and then gradually accelerate to the point where the last slide sounded like it was delivered by Alvin and the Chipmunks. After the first talk we met the translators in the corridor. The culture here is polite and friendly and I think they abhor violence. Still, I was glad that the translators didn't have a club handy.

Here are the important sites and documents we referred to during the talk. The San Francisco versions of both talks are available online at developers.sun.com:

• Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 1: Lookin' Good
• Extreme GUI Makeover, Episode 2: Runnin' Fast

Romain Guy developed some of the special effects shown in the "Lookin' Good" presentation and he's been writing about them in his jroller blog as well as his blog on java.net. The code for some of the special effects is available now from the SwingFX project . The animation framework used to animate the button and window backgrounds was written by Chet Haase and is the basis of an open source project at timingframework.dev.java.net

The Mustang splash screen API is documented in this java.sun.com tutorial And you can download an early access build of Mustang from mustang.dev.java.net.

Scott Violet's in-depth article about performance tuning applications with large JTables is available on java.sun.com: Christmas Tree Applications

The SwingWorker API, for moving work from the event dispatching thread to a worker thread, has been extensively documented. The latest documents and downloads can be found at swingworker.dev.java.net

The latest beta release of NetBeans includes support for performance tuning and the new Matisse Swing GUI designer. You can download NetBeans from netbeans.org. Information about configuring the GC, for example to reduce startup time by making the heap big enough, can be also found on the netbeans site: performance.netbeans.org/howto/jvmswitches/

Three other bloggers have covered the Extreme GUI talks at JavaOne Japan: Charles Ditzel: Live From Tokyo: Extreme UI Makeover - A Great Talk on Developing Powerful Desktop Apps and John O'Conner: JavaOne Tokyo '05: Extreme GUI Makeover and Greg Sporar from the NetBeans team: JavaOne Tokyo, Day One. Scott, Josh and I appreciate the coverage and the photos (thanks John)!