Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4
I’ve been following the development of Flash Catalyst, formerly known as Thermo, ever since it was announced and I was really happy when Adobe finally released Flash Catalyst beta 1 earlier this month. I played with it a little and I am really excited by what this tool will become. To give Catalyst a try, [...]
Shelves, an Open Source Android application
A few months ago, I showed Shelves, an application to manage a collection of books on Android powered phones. I am an avid user of Delicious Library on MacOS X and I since no similar application existed at the time for Android, I decided to write my own. Needless to say, Shelves was largely inspired [...]
Sexy Swing Apps on Mac OS X
A few months ago I stumbled upon what came to be one of the most interesting Swing blogs I’ve ever read. Actually, it is the most interesting Swing blog I know of. Exploding Pixels, by Ken Orr, shows how to create beautiful looking Swing applications for Mac OS X. Ken has a great sense of [...]
Filthy Rich Clients in Japanese
Thanks to the hard work of Kouichi Matsuda, Filthy Rich Clients is now available in Japanese. Now I wish I didn’t drop out of my Japanese class after only one year :)
A New Blog
Chet Haase, a good friend and fellow co-author, just opened his new blog. I won’t spoil you the surprise but you might be interested to know what Chet is up to nowadays :)
What do you want to hear about?
Chet and I are going to present another installment of Filthy Rich Clients at JavaOne 2008. We have a bunch of cool ideas for techniques and demos we would like to show you but I am very interested in hearing what you want to know about. If you have any visual effect, animation or graphics [...]
Animated Transitions Made Easy
Chet finally released his AnimatedTransition library. This library is discussed in details in Chapter 18 of our book. Given its name, I won’t insult you by explaining what this library does :)
More Awesomeness From Adobe
Adobe just released the AIF Toolkit which lets you create GPU-accelerated visual effects by using some sort of a pixel shader programming language. Apparently this technology, Hydra, will be included in Flash. Hmm, time to learn Flash and Flex more deeply?
Adobe Thermo
The more I play with Flex, the more I like it. I’ve been following this technology for a few months now and today I just stumbled upon a very exciting article. It’s a report of Adobe MAX where a new tool, called Thermo, was showcased. Apparently it lets you turn a Photoshop mockup into a [...]
Another Free Chapter
InfoQ just published a review of Filthy Rich Clients. This review contains a link to chapter 14 of the book, Timing Framework Fundamentals. Enjoy!
Beautiful Swing
Palantir guys are doing the kind of applications I wish I worked on (at least on the UI.) Check out their screenshots.
The Secret Behind Nimbus
Jasper just posted a blog entry in which he explains that Nimbus is almost done. That is exciting. Even more exciting is how Nimbus was implemented. Nimbus was built entirely with shapes and vectors in a visual editing tool built as a NetBeans module. This let Jasper and Richard draw every single component, even the [...]
New Look and Feel
Synthetica now supports a new theme called WhiteVision. It’s a beautiful modern theme that I really encourage you to try. Screenshots can be found on Synthetica’s web site but you can also try the new Synthetica Office demo to check it out.
First review for Filthy Rich Clients
If you’re still not sure whether you should buy a copy of Filthy Rich Clients, take a look at our first review by Gregg Bolinger. Thanks Gregg!
Java Roots
James Gosling just put online a video of the project Green user interface (141 MB). Green, and its language Oak which later became Java, was running on the Star7, some sort of PDA/remote control Sun Microsystems was working on. It was in 1992. Enjoy, it’s worth the look.
Progress Bars Are Boring (Extreme GUI Makeover)
Some applications, like Eclipse, show a progress bar in their splash screen during the startup phase. This is a useful way to show the user that the application is actually working in the background. It helps the user to wait for the end of the process without kicking. Without such a progress indicator, the application [...]
Putting Blurry Background to Good Use
I blogged a while ago about Artemis. This simple tool uses a blurry background to draw user’s attention onto a modal progress bar. Artemis is a good example of how you can use a blurry background. It emphasizes the importance of the modal dialog which doesn’t require any context. You can watch a video of [...]
Rounded Corners and Shadow for Dialogs (Extreme GUI Makeover)
At JavaOne 2007, the Extreme GUI Makeover demo showed a semi-translucent dialog over a blurry background. This effect was explained in a previous entry on this blog. However, I received a few requests asking how the dialog itself was implemented. This dialog is shown in the screenshot below. Not only is it translucent, but it [...]
Another Pretty Java Application
JavaDesktop.org just published a new Swing Sighting. The application is called Palantir and sports a very clean, very modern-looking Swing user interface. They even emulated Office 2007 menu/toolbar. I really urge you to go take a look at the screenshots.
Blurred Background for Dialogs (Extreme GUI Makeover 2007)
Shannon, Chris and I showed many cool effects during this year’s Extreme GUI Makeover session, at JavaOne 2007. Since we cannot release the source code yet, I will explain some of the effects in detail. I will start with the blurred background displayed when a modal dialog shows up. Blurring a dialog’s or a menu’s [...]
Improving Groovy Console’s GUI
Groovy is a very appealing language that I really enjoy using from time to time. Unfortunately, as many other languages, Groovy lacks decent development environments. Even though this shortcoming is being addressed by the Eclipse and IntelliJ, the Groovy Console remains a valuable tool to quickly test an expression or a script. The console works [...]
Repaint Manager Demos (Chapter 11)
The source code, demos and examples for the chapter 11 of Filthy Rich Clients are available online. This chapter presents the repaint manager. Chapter 11 presents two demos, TranslucentPanel and ReflectionPanel The first one is an exercise for the reader showing why and when the user of a RepaintManager is necessary. The second one presents [...]
New Web Site
Chet just uploaded www.filthyrichclients.org, the web site I designed for our upcoming book, Filthy Rich Clients. We will try to make the demos and their source code available on this web site as zip archives. For the time being, the web site offers a link to the project page where you can find the CVS [...]
Demos for Chapters on Performance and Composites
The source code for the demos of chapters 5 (Performance) and 6 (Composites) from our book is available in the CVS repository.
