Scott Violet's Blog

November 2006 Archives

Extreme GUI Makeover: 2006

For the 2006 session we decided to make over a mail client. A good chunk of my day goes into reading email, so I had a plethora of ideas in this area. This was true of Romain and Shannon as well. We didn't have the time to craft a real mail client, or the time to come up to speed on one of the many open source mail clients out there. As such, we put together a shell of a mail app. It has just the amount of functionality we needed for the demo, that's it. We tuned for demos, with just the windows look and feel. Romain says it works on OS X, which is surprising. There is plenty of stuff that doesn't work, and you can get stuck in areas where you can't get out. It's most defintely a DEMO! Let me say that one more time, THIS IS A DEMO! None-the-less we've gotten a slew of email requests for the code, some friendly, some not so friendly. So, in all it's glory, here's the code.

Here's a screen shot of the before:

And the after, with a traditional table:

A screen shot with a rich list:

The screen shots don't do the transformation justice; they can't show transitions, animation, custom drag and drop effects... For that, you need to run the app. You can run the app by downloanding this zip file, extracting it, and invoking java -jar mailman.jar on the jar file.

All 103 slides from the session can be found here.

A big part of the presentation was showing the ugly, then transitioning to the improved. To provide a similar experience for those trying the app now, I scripted the whole app with Robot. If you don't move the mouse, the demo will drive itself. It'll take you through each of the stages showing the before and after. I'll go over how this was done in more detail later. For those that want to know now, look in the appscripter package.

Wouldn't it be cool if I did voice overs? Or music? Or provided links to the code while running it? Or fixed some bugs in the message handling? Or added comments? Yes, yes and YES! The list of things I would like to do to this app could keep me employed for years. But, I know folks want the source, so we're cutting the cord. Have at it! I do promise Shannon, Romain and myself will go over aspects of the session in more detail over time.

Enjoy!

     -Scott

PS For those thinking a webstart link would be ideal. I agree. For JavaOne I threw a 5MB mailbox at the original parsing code, and it took minutes. I rewrote it using NIO, which means it won't work from WebStart. Hans pointed this out months ago. Not having time myself, I dropped the gauntlet and challenged Hans to give me the code that would suck down the mailboxes so that it would work from WebStart. Months later that code isn't in my mail box. Perhaps the public humiliation will be enough to get Hans to give me the code and I'll update the app later on;)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.