Java desktop links of the week, October 26

A pretty good news week this one, but because it’s a public holiday here in New Zealand, and I’d rather be enjoying the sun, I’m cutting straight to it. Enjoy!

General

• Josh Marinacci has blogged about an important topic in user interface design – Colour (although he unfortunately calls it ‘color’ ). He goes into the background and science of colour, and it’s well worth a read for anyone tasked with building compelling user interfaces.

Swing

• Coming out of left field this week was PureSwing, which looks to be the best contender for the Swing 2.0 that I discussed earlier in the year. This looks to be a very interesting project, and one which I hope to see further discussion around in the coming days as people explore it.
• Kirill Grouchnikov clearly had Flamingo on his mind this week, with two blog posts discussing how he has enhanced the ribbon application menu in Flamingo 4.2, and improvements to the command buttons in Flamingo to support buttons with no text and/or graphic.
• IBM developerWorks has an article on writing Swing user applications with JRuby.
• Java.net interviewed André van Kouwen, founder of a new java.net project, GMVC. GMVC claims to expedite Swing application development and best practices by using Generic Views, Models and Generic Controllers.
• The Better Swing Application Framework announced the milestone 2 release of BSAF 1.9. As noted on their website, BSAF is a fork of the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296). Primary goals for the upcoming release: improve stability, keep backward compatibility with last public release of the SAF (1.03), bug fixing, documentation update (javadoc, introduction), unit tests update, examples update.

JavaFX

• Having just popped up before putting this post out, I haven’t watched this yet, but Peter Pilgrim has given a talk titled ‘Enterprise JavaFX for the web platform‘ that may be interesting to people out there.
• IDE support is starting to improve for JavaFX, with both Eclipse and NetBeans getting newer / beta plugin releases. For NetBeans, it is 6.8 beta, which includes improved code completion, editor hints and navigation. The beta is available now, with the final release due in December. Additionally, the Exadel JavaFX Studio 1.1 plugin for Eclipse has been released, which includes much of the same functionality, but obviously for Eclipse. Now that I’m developing for Sun, I use NetBeans, but man do I miss Eclipse. Perhaps when I start reading some good reviews for either of the two Eclipse plugins, I’ll give them a try again.
• Some guy called James Gosling posted a JavaFX-based map browser that he used when presenting at Oracle OpenWorld recently. You can find out more at the Kenai project page.
• Sten Anderson blogged about Music Explorer FX Mobile Edition, which is a port of his award-winning Music Explorer FX to work on JavaFX-enabled mobile devices.
• Stephen Chin announced a new release of WidgetFX, which includes a new slideshow widget, improved support for 64-bit and international operating systems, and of course bug fixes.
• Eric Wendelin blogged about the technology behind Cheqlist, which I referred to last week. Cheqlist is a JavaFX application that connects to the online Remember The Milk web service.

Special Bonus Link

• Because I’m feeling generous and because it’s a public holiday here in New Zealand, here’s a special bonus link that isn’t directly desktop related, but you really should go to it anyway. It’s one of many overviews of the Google Collections library, which you should all be using as it is an absolutely great library.

As always, have a great week everyone, and keep up all the hard work.