This session was presented by Karsten Lentzsch, founder of JGoodies. Karsten said, “It’s easy to program swing … badly.” According to Karsten, the average desktop project does not have a budget for UI usability analysis. This is especially true for many Open Source projects. Krasten presented some Swing dos, like do remove clutter by writing short text labels, do remove duplicate borders, do reduce design to its core essence, do use a stable aspect ration such as 1:1 or 4:5, do add negative space. Karsten believes that white space is not wasted space. In addition, he favors space to separators.
Some dont’s include don’t use saturated colors, don’t change fonts (use native fonts and size), don’t break the icon design (use a consistent icon set).
In closing, Karsten said that “many people could do at least good layout with Matisse.”
A personal note. I saw my former instructor at SJSU at this session, Professor Horstmann. Professor Horstmann is author of Core Java.
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