Can Java do fancy GUIs?

T

Tomislav

hiwa wrote:

And you might have to notice, for example, that modern car
no more has manual gearbox.

I dare say that that depends largely on the part of the world you live in. ;)
</offtopic>
 
C

Chris Uppal

hiwa said:
I wonder do all of you really know that 'high standard',
'sophisticated', 'fancy', 'sexy' blah blah UI is a steep
learning curve for ordinary common people users.

Don't confuse 'high standard' with 'fancy'.

That cuts both ways. Not only does 'fancy' not imply good, but /not/ 'fancy'
doesn't imply good either.

I have no idea what the OP meant by wanting to produce GUIs to a high standard.
It's possible that he meant that he wanted to produce the sort of wretched,
glitzy, gaudy, abomination that is becoming all too common. But it's at
least as possible that what he is aiming for is to produce solidly engineered,
straight-forwardly usable, application such as one all too rarely finds.

Producing the latter requires (at least) considerable effort from the
programmer/designer. Every aspect of the GUI, the user interaction, and the
application logic (or flow) has to be considered in relation to every other
aspect. Even assuming the existence of such a design, simply coding it
requires, usually, a great deal of sophistication in the use of whatever
pre-packaged widgets are available, or the ability to produce new widgets that
work /seamlessly/ with all the existing widgets.

There are no short-cuts.

AFAIK, Swing isn't a particularly good place to start if you want to produce
that kind of interface. OTOH, it isn't a particularly bad place to start
either. If you want a well-crafted GUI then you are going to have to do a
/lot/ of work, no matter what toolkit you are using.

-- chris
 
K

Karsten Lentzsch

hiwa said:
I wonder do all of you really know that 'high standard',
'sophisticated', 'fancy', 'sexy' blah blah UI is a steep
learning curve for ordinary common people users.

It humiliates them.
[...]

First off, I don't understand how this is related
to my posting regarding Ted Hill's question.

Anyway, I've found in my Swing and design courses
that most developers can learn the design essentials
in about 3 weeks. With a little review help, they
can significantly improve their design capabilities
and design costs. In addition they feel much better
- and a lot of those developers I teached report
that they now enjoy designing user interfaces.

From the feedback I receive after talks,
it seems to me that my article I referred to
does not humiliate developers. I don't know
if you have taken the time to look at it.
The article starts with a bunch of Don'ts,
things you should avoid, to not alienate users;
these are simple but very effective.
The Do's require more work and time,
but help you improve your design results.

- Karsten Lentzsch
 
K

Karsten Lentzsch

Karsten said:
Anyway, I've found in my Swing and design courses
that most developers can learn the design essentials
in about 3 weeks. [...]

Oops, that should read "in about 3 days".

- Karsten
 
V

Virgil Green

Tomislav said:
hiwa wrote:



I dare say that that depends largely on the part of the world you
live in. ;) </offtopic>

and I certainly prefer the manual gearbox
 
I

IchBin

John said:
I do not think that URL will work for most people. :eek:)
Sorry....

http://24.115.55.47:8080

--


Thanks in Advance...
IchBin
__________________________________________________________________________

'The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical
substances:
if there is any reaction, both are transformed.'
- Carl Gustav Jung, (1875-1961), psychiatrist and psychologist
 
T

Thomas G. Marshall

Karsten Lentzsch coughed up:
hiwa said:
I wonder do all of you really know that 'high standard',
'sophisticated', 'fancy', 'sexy' blah blah UI is a steep
learning curve for ordinary common people users.

It humiliates them.
[...]

First off, I don't understand how this is related
to my posting regarding Ted Hill's question.

Anyway, I've found in my Swing and design courses
that most developers can learn the design essentials
in about 3 weeks.

In my experience, that amount of time will produce sophisticated enough
/looking/ gui's but not stable ones. There is always some MT thing lurking
around the corner with code written by people unused to swing. It allows
everything to run fine for a while and then kablooey.
 
D

Dag Sunde

Tim Ward said:
There surely isn't really anybody who would click on a numeric link??

I can't for my life see whats wrong with clicking on a numeric link?
A domain-name doesn't really tell you anything, does it?
The only difference is that you save a DNS-lookup...

But the fun part, is that http://24.115.55.47:8080 contains the following:
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0;http://localhost:8080/JHackerAppManager">
so you don't get any further anyway.

This will take the "daring" ones to where the OP probably wanted us
to go:
http://24.115.55.47:8080/JHackerAppManager/
 
C

Chris Uppal

Tim said:
There surely isn't really anybody who would click on a numeric link??

Sure. Why not ?

Since I have no control over what's at the far end of the link anyway (however
the link is presented), it is my responsibility to ensure that I have adequate
protection against any malware that might be on the site. If I have adequate
protection (whatever that might mean to me) then there's no reason not to visit
anonymous sites. If I /don't/ have adequate protection then I'd be an idiot to
visit any site, whatever its (apparent) name.

-- chris
 
A

Alex Hunsley

Thomas said:
Alex Hunsley coughed up:



Simple well known widgets quite often are "distractions" and "get in the
way".

In some circumstances they could be a pain. Do you have any recent
examples in mind?
I believe that in far more cases than not, however, standard widgets
will do the job. And in the case of the OP, he seems to not even be
aware of what the standard widgets can and can't do - hardly a good
place from which to be thinking about making custom widgets.
A good gui has everything to do with a good designer and not
home-grown vs. standard widgets arguments.

Yes. But it's still the case that in most cases, basic widgets will do
the job, and that if one is thinking of customizing widgets, it's
important to ask "Why am I doing this?".
 
A

Alex Hunsley

hiwa said:
I wonder do all of you really know that 'high standard',
'sophisticated', 'fancy', 'sexy' blah blah UI is a steep
learning curve for ordinary common people users.

It humiliates them.

And you must be aware of that the Java has simplified
almost every field of application level computing and
its development effort.

And you might have to notice, for example, that modern car
no more has manual gearbox.

I didn't notice that. I like in the UK where by far modern cars have
manuals.
 
A

Alex Hunsley

Thomas said:
Karsten Lentzsch coughed up:
hiwa wrote:

I wonder do all of you really know that 'high standard',
'sophisticated', 'fancy', 'sexy' blah blah UI is a steep
learning curve for ordinary common people users.

It humiliates them.
[...]

First off, I don't understand how this is related
to my posting regarding Ted Hill's question.

Anyway, I've found in my Swing and design courses
that most developers can learn the design essentials
in about 3 weeks.


In my experience, that amount of time will produce sophisticated enough
/looking/ gui's but not stable ones. There is always some MT thing lurking
around the corner with code written by people unused to swing. It allows
everything to run fine for a while and then kablooey.

And even once you know the pitfalls of writing swing code (event thread
issues etc) it can still be quite annoying to write it....
often found myself wishing swing could handle more of the bookkeeping
stuff transparently.
And when you do things wrong, often there's nothing to particularly tell
you so.... If you're lucky, your whole GUI might freeze and that's a big
hint. Other things are smymptomless until, one day, it all goes kablooey
as you say....
 
T

Thomas G. Marshall

Alex Hunsley coughed up:
In some circumstances they could be a pain. Do you have any recent
examples in mind?
I believe that in far more cases than not, however, standard widgets
will do the job. And in the case of the OP, he seems to not even be
aware of what the standard widgets can and can't do - hardly a good
place from which to be thinking about making custom widgets.


Yes. But it's still the case that in most cases, basic widgets will do
the job, and that if one is thinking of customizing widgets, it's
important to ask "Why am I doing this?".

Of /course/.

Define "do the job". Text interfaces can usually "do the job". The issue
is how to do the job as well as possible, according to good gui
methodologies.
 
I

IchBin

Dag said:
I can't for my life see whats wrong with clicking on a numeric link?
A domain-name doesn't really tell you anything, does it?
The only difference is that you save a DNS-lookup...

But the fun part, is that http://24.115.55.47:8080 contains the following:
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0;http://localhost:8080/JHackerAppManager">
so you don't get any further anyway.

This will take the "daring" ones to where the OP probably wanted us
to go:
http://24.115.55.47:8080/JHackerAppManager/

*Sorry*, I am running a Tomcat App Server off of my machine. Will move
to an ISP add buy a domain Name when I am finished building my site. So
I do not have my own domain name yet, hence the IP address. Why spend
any money for development when I do not have to.

I did not think that clicking on an IP address would make people *knees
shake*.

Yes, it is really pointing to
http://24.115.55.47:8080/JHackerAppManager/. That just so happens to be
the name of my product. It is a 'Windows XP SP 2 Firewall Audit
Application'.

It was just by *chance* that the Product name and clicking on an "IP
address link" where mixed together to make people think about their own
security concerns.

If any of you did have a security concern then I think that you better
start look around for software to protect your machine.

I personally would hate to have that feeling of not going to a link
address because of my security concerns. Kinda takes away the freedom of
the Internet..

But then this email is getting way out-of-scope for my initial reason
for posting my link, That is, GUI design. I use a mixture of LAF's with
the main structure being "Goodies Forms". I do have screenshots there
for the people who know their own security strength and weakness issues
to take the journey.

Sorry, I just thought of something funny...LOL

I noticed the author of the http://www.jgoodies.com/ Products, Karsten
Lentzsch has posted to this thread. I just wanted to thank him for all
of his products and guidance by his web site. I only hope I do his forms
justice, in his eyes.

--

Thanks in Advance...
IchBin
__________________________________________________________________________

'The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical
substances:
if there is any reaction, both are transformed.'
- Carl Gustav Jung, (1875-1961), psychiatrist and psychologist
 
T

Thomas G. Marshall

Alex Hunsley coughed up:
I didn't notice that. I like in the UK where by far modern cars have
manuals.

I live in the US and my cars (audi-a4, and honda crv) come with manual
still.

{shrug}
 

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