Dos and Dont’s for Swing 

This session describes how to build a Swing application that looks good and works well. It presents the most critical Dont’s -things you should avoid - and the most important Dos - guidelines you should follow. You learn about easy steps for improving the appearance of your visual design and how to compete with or outperform decent native desktop applications. Several examples of good and poor design demonstrate the effect of the techniques described in this session.

Prerequisite knowledge: Beginner

Outline:
Introduction
- Presentation Goal
- Agenda
- The problems we face
- 10 Steps to improve your UI
- Focus of this talk

Don’ts
- Principles
- Colors, Fonts, Icons

Do’s
- Clutter
- Reduce to its essence
- Special Swing problems
- Negative space
- Align,group, relate, balance
- Consistency, aspect ratios, contrast
- Scaling with font, resolution

Tips & Tricks
- Looks&Feels
- Advanced layout issues
- Responsiveness, application startup
- Performance
- The power of the Java Foundation Classes

Before & After Examples

Summary & References
- Summary
- References: libraries, projects, articles, books
- Questions & Answers

Karsten Lentzsch  JGoodies As architect and designer of Java tools, demos and several professional Swing libraries, Karsten Lentzsch is considered a leading expert in Java user interface technology and pluggable look and feel. He brings a wealth of experience in designing usable and elegant Java application to JGoodies. For over 15 years Karsten has been involved in object technologies and user interface design as a consultant, trainer, architect and expert developer. Since adopting Java programming early in 1997 he has designed and developed stand-alone applications, application frameworks, Java libraries and enhancements to the Java look. He publishes articles about Java UI topics and talks at major Java conferences.