Extreme GUI Makeover: Lookin’ Better

This session was like Queer Eye for the UI Guy. The presenters, Scott Violet, Shannon Hickey, and Romain Guy (all from Sun Microsystems) spiced up a mail client not much unlike Thunderbird. It truly was as if Thunderbird got a makeover. The presenters did some very AJAXy type of UI enhancements, such as fade ins and outs, presenting tabular data as rich lists with images, and some animation. If you want to spice up your application you can do the following: use the Timing Framework for fade in and out animations, make use of gradients, use alternative colors for rows within a table, enbrace white space (already mentioned in Dos and Dont’s For Swing Apps), use the glass pane, and add some drop shadows and translucency.

If you are interested in making over your UI, here are some projects you should look into: SwingLabs and JH Labs. Here are some class names that you might also look into: TimingController, ShadowFactory, JXCollapsablePane, and BasicGradientPainter.

After this session I felt like asking these peeps if they would pimp my UI.

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