Will Iverson's Blog

Great Looking Swing

Comments

• Usability is what's needed more
  When I downloaded the jGoodies "evolution of a UI" demo, I was fairly excited to see someone take the horrible swing guis that typically crop up and rework it with some usability in mind.

  Well, they didn't do that. Basically, all they did was fix icons, colors and fonts. Now, those are important to having a nice looking app, but usability is far more important, and the demo app looks horrendously complex and in serious need of usability enhancements.

  What's really needed in swing (or in an add-on) are some features to help usability. Keyboard navigation is a major pain. Default button behavior is very odd. GridBagLayout is quirky. JTable + JScrollpane is unpredictable. Making a decent UI and making it more usable is very difficult in swing. I've spent the same amount of time getting tab order setup and default button behvaior sensible as I have writing the entire rest of the UI! That is not right.

  Using the proper icons, fonts, and colors is a no-brainer. Swing makes it pretty easy to avoid making some ugly delphi-looking UI. We need more.

  Posted by: davetron5000 on January 29, 2004 at 01:33 PM

• Usability is what's needed more
  Hmm. I think there's more there than just icon/color/font fixing (and even if that was all, it's more than worth the $0 ;)

  I agree that keyboard navigation is a pain. Good ol' ResEdit & Mac OS classic toolbox used to have a way to do that for dialog automatically, and I think some of the old VisualCafe stuff had some extensions to make this easier, but it's still a pain (esp for a non-tool specific use).

  The layouts are also funky. I've seen some alternative layout code out there, not sure of the links off the top of my head...
  

  Posted by: wiverson on January 29, 2004 at 01:46 PM

• jgoodies
  gui usability can't really be a responsibility of the gui API? there are plenty of books and internet resources that can help but i think it comes down to experience a lot too..

  jgoodies is certainly the best l&f i've seen available - take a look at

  http://javootoo.l2fprod.com/

  for the competition - a number of which are abysmal in comparison :)

  Posted by: asjf on January 30, 2004 at 07:10 AM

• Give them a break
  These guys are single handedly making swing apps look MUCH better. We use Looks and Forms in our product, and they have made a huge improvement in the appearance of our app.

  This is the first l&f that I've seen that looks like it was actually designed by a graphic artist.

  Willis Morse
  MetaServer, Inc

  Posted by: willismorse on January 30, 2004 at 07:42 AM

• Not addressing the other main problem
  It's cool someone actually figured out that the
  metal UI is ugly as hell, but SWING's main problem is that it's also slow as hell. I can't wait 10 years for my UI to respond - nor can I spend $4000 to off set SWING's slow performance

  Posted by: pulse1014 on January 30, 2004 at 11:29 AM

• Not addressing the other main problem
  SWT is still more practical to use.

  Posted by: pulse1014 on January 30, 2004 at 11:30 AM

• Less criticism and more action...
  It is in fact good to see someone is making the effort to improve the way swing looks. I have to catch myself when I complain. We all should contribute to solving the problem. SWT is a cop-out, not a solution.

  Posted by: jseltzer on January 30, 2004 at 02:25 PM

• Swing is lightning fast
  Show me a slow Swing app and I'll show you some code that doesn't understand the Swing threading model.
  SwingWorker is your friend.
  

  Posted by: markswanson on January 30, 2004 at 08:36 PM

• Less criticism and more action...
  Secure unsigned pure Java JWS apps are the only way to prevent spyware and viruses. SWT breaks the security sandbox by forcing your application to use native 3rd party libraries.
  

  Posted by: markswanson on January 30, 2004 at 08:41 PM

• Re: Usability is being addressed
  JGoodies is not meant to enhance the Swing Widgets, you have other projects that do that.

  I think you may be pleasently surprised if you look at http://uic.sf.net where most of your examples are covered.

  Tab-order, good Layout Manager, JTable has many programmer 'usability' enhancements, keyboard navigation is so easy its really a no-brainer.

  Along with things like the undo-redo support as well as a context popup on each textfield this project aims for usability first.

  Cheers

  Posted by: zander on January 31, 2004 at 07:24 AM

• Swing is lightning fast
  I agree completely, but I would suggest foxtrot and spin are better solutions than the swingworker.

  Foxtrot is simply brilliant. Easy to learn, snappy and makes perceived performance (which is what counts) lightening fast.

  Swing is great, but takes a while to learn how to code "optimally".

  Posted by: joecole on February 01, 2004 at 12:51 AM

• Usability is what's needed more
  "Using the proper icons, fonts, and colors is a no-brainer. "

  I haven't seen many apps that I consider "great looking", let alone using the proper fonts, icons and colors! Most app's, especially open source, are ugly as hell, which is the first usability concern.

  The metamorphosis demo was not (from my knowledge) designed to show you how to do usability testing, but basically takes an application from the state most are in, to a more professional looking application.

  Usability testing on the whole is pretty simple. Good old nielsen said it best when he made the comment "testing with 5 users finds 95% of the problems" (or something to that matter).

  Al you need to do is use some software that records user interactions + audio, give them a list of tasks, and let them loose on your software. You would be amazed at how many simple things you can find using this technique.

  There are no hard and fast rules for every application - if there were, usability would not be an issue - so you just need to take the time to do it for each application you create.

  Joe

  Posted by: joecole on February 01, 2004 at 12:58 AM

• Less criticism and more action...
  Well since SWT is open, I can make modifications to it for whatever reason. All I can do about Swing is bitch, since it's not really open and it's harder to contribute..

  SWT is not a cop-out. It's a realistic solution to a problem in the real world. Theoritically Swing kills SWT, but in the real world - Swing is too slow to compete. I like my GUIs responding faster than I can think.

  Posted by: pulse1014 on February 01, 2004 at 02:58 PM

• Swing is lightning fast
  One word - Netbeans

  Posted by: pulse1014 on February 01, 2004 at 02:58 PM

• Less criticism and more action...
  We'll see if Swing can be redeemed when Tiger comes out. - I'm hopping it will, but we'll just have to wait.

  Posted by: pulse1014 on February 01, 2004 at 03:01 PM

• Less criticism and more action...
  By the way, I've used eclipse and the only part that's faster is the menus coming down from the menu bar. Everything else is no faster than swing.

  Posted by: jseltzer on February 01, 2004 at 08:45 PM

• Less criticism and more action...
  No sh-t, sherlock. Gee, the UI (menus, etc...) is faster. That's the SWT vs Swing difference.
  That's what also keeps me from using Netbeans in that I can think of what to do next before the UI responds.

  The stuff that is the same speed as Netbeans is the backend.

  Posted by: pulse1014 on February 02, 2004 at 06:07 AM

• Less criticism and more action...
  Actually *only* the menus are faster. Buttons, though they may be native, aren't any faster, and neither are any of the other widgets.

  I'm not sure why. Maybe SWT's event thread still runs in Java even though all the drawing is done natively, maybe someone who knows more about it could shed some light on the issue.

  All I can say for sure is that wx4j applications are far, far more responsive than SWT applications.

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