Ok, so I'm working on this application, (calling it "phosphor" - here's a screenshot). Anyway, it's a PNG decoder/viewer/editor (no editing yet, but I will add that ability later). ANyway, you can see from the screenshot that the decoder is working, but my UI sucks. I really meed more practice with this whole "GUI" thing....
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Even in Java, I suck at GUI programming.
- Thread starter notfred
- Start date
There is Jamba and Jbuilder.
Actually HCI (basically the computer science of user interfaces) is not a simple concept picked up through hacking. You should at least take your university's course(s) as a good starting point. Read Donald Norman's books; not directly about programming, but fascinating stuff. Nielsen is considered a guru of Web usability, and the thin client interface is predominant nowadays.
At least with Java for example, I don't believe there were any good GUI/HCI books out for years. The only offerings were ho-hum AWT, then Swing texts. Sun finally came out with one (Java Look & Feel Guidelines) a few years back. I read most of it online, and it's high quality but falls short because it doesn't demonstrate proper code or patterns to implement successful designs. It needed more practical coding guidelines IMO.
Independent of Swing, part of what I'm saying is the vast majority of hackers and wannabe hackers are not successful GUI designers.
Edit:
Another reason exacerbating the Swing GUI usability situation is how relatively easy it is to program with the API. It may not be drag and drop just like VB (but there are too many two-way GOOD visual form designers for Java to count out), but even coding by command-line is quite accessible. Easy to pick up, but obviously challenging to master.
Btw, how do you like the MRJ for OS X? It's up to Java2 1.3 now? I wish they'd hurry up and port Apple's nifty shared memory JVM feature to other platforms. 🙁
At least with Java for example, I don't believe there were any good GUI/HCI books out for years. The only offerings were ho-hum AWT, then Swing texts. Sun finally came out with one (Java Look & Feel Guidelines) a few years back. I read most of it online, and it's high quality but falls short because it doesn't demonstrate proper code or patterns to implement successful designs. It needed more practical coding guidelines IMO.
Independent of Swing, part of what I'm saying is the vast majority of hackers and wannabe hackers are not successful GUI designers.
Edit:
Another reason exacerbating the Swing GUI usability situation is how relatively easy it is to program with the API. It may not be drag and drop just like VB (but there are too many two-way GOOD visual form designers for Java to count out), but even coding by command-line is quite accessible. Easy to pick up, but obviously challenging to master.
Btw, how do you like the MRJ for OS X? It's up to Java2 1.3 now? I wish they'd hurry up and port Apple's nifty shared memory JVM feature to other platforms. 🙁
FeathersMcGraw
Diamond Member
Second the recommendation for Norman. "The Design of Everyday Things" was part of our syllabus for my HCI class, and even though it's more concerned with physical/industrial design, it illustrates the absolute necessity of considering clear metaphor when creating any interface.
I haven't seen a WYSIWYG Java GUI builder yet that didn't produce incomprehensible code. Worse, a lot of them use null layout managers and absolute positioning (which flies entirely in the face of the layout manager design in the first place). Any recommendations are welcome.
The danger of the simplicity of the API is that it conceals the design tradeoff that enabled it -- lack of thread safety in all of the Swing classes. It's exceedingly easy to build a simple window/button/dialog interface, but a lot more insidious if you have complex tree/table models which you want to compute/update asynchronously to keep the interface from freezing up.
I found this gui editor works really at least for windows, never tried the mac version, it's almost drag and drop
http://www.netbeans.org
http://www.netbeans.org
Perhaps that's why to date, I still handcraft Swing UIs (mind you I rarely have the actual need or desire to). But this brings up one of the ironies of the Java L&F Guidelines. IIRC, all the recommendations were stated in PIXELS. As a whole, I thought the work was good and the standard GUI attractive and usable, but I scratched my head on how the team (JavaSoft) that brought the dynamic layout manager to the masses ended up with mostly recommendation in terms of absolute positioning.
Maybe I'm off base on the quality of Java RAD GUI development tools. I really thought they are at least 3rd generation by now, and mostly good. I was quite impressed with the unique IBM VisualAge for Java GUI builder back in 1997, but they've long since EOL'd that product in favor of Websphere/Eclipse.
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