Comments on: Extreme GUI Makeover

By: Adrian Sutton

Adrian Sutton — Mon, 14 May 2007 15:02:05 +0000

>I think you’re a bit naive to think that Usability could have been easily added.
and then:
>The cost of actually implementing flashy effects would be allocated at weeks where as the cost of usability could be measured in man days.

So is usability to hard to include in the session or too easy to be bothered with? Sticking to just the one argument might be beneficial.

By: javaguy44

javaguy44 — Mon, 14 May 2007 08:21:50 +0000

I’m not misunderstanding your complaint at all — I know exactly what you are whinging about.

I think you’re a bit naive to think that Usability could have been easily added. Do you know how long it takes to prepare for JavaOne session? Usability is such a broad area, it would have inevitably lead to feature creep had they tried to bring it in two. on top of that, I don’t know any of the presenters personally, but they have day jobs plus two of them are trying to write a book.

If you haven’t prepared a session or written a book simultaneously then I’d have to say you can’t speak from experience.

>There isn’t a great deal of difficulty in doing flashy effects and making stuff look cool, even with swing (it >just takes time and dedication). What is difficult is knowing when to use them and doing so effectively.

We can agree to disagree but in terms of delivery, the cost of doing flashy effects is far far greater than the cost of knowing when to use them(a bit of planning, common sense, and uat). The cost of actually implementing flashy effects would be allocated at weeks where as the cost of usability could be measured in man days.

By: Adrian Sutton

Adrian Sutton — Sat, 12 May 2007 00:58:00 +0000

I think you’re misunderstanding my complaint. There isn’t a great deal of difficulty in doing flashy effects and making stuff look cool, even with swing (it just takes time and dedication). What is difficult is knowing when to use them and doing so effectively. The session could quite easily have made the application both look fantastic with a whole heap of really flashy cool effects *and* be more usable. Quite a number of times they talked about why they were using the effects (to help the user see what changes more clearly, to draw attention to specific parts etc), so they clearly cared about usability, they just didn’t stop and think about the impact of all of the changes they made which was a shame.

It’s good that swing developers are being inspired to create more flashy, good looking interfaces, it’s just a shame that with all the talk about improving the user experience, in many cases it’s actually ruining the user experience when it didn’t need to.

By: javaguy44

javaguy44 — Sat, 12 May 2007 00:42:33 +0000

I’m not sure I understand your beef, b/c the session was clearly labeled “Extreme GUI Makeover”. Not “Extreme Usability”. Or “Usability for those searching for good ideas”. Perhaps before attending the session, you should have seen the previous years? Aerith and pimping out an outlook lookalike the year before were all Effects.

Personally, I think it’s a good needed thing. You can google, grok JGoodies or go through JIDE’s demo for good ideas on usability…there are a lot of resourcss out there. But Romain, Chet, Chris are of a very small community of members who show you the fancy Flash like stuff you can do w/ Swing + Java2D.

By: Andrew Herron

Andrew Herron — Thu, 10 May 2007 22:23:59 +0000

getFontMetrics().stringWidth() is so handy that we’ve already used it a few times in EL… getStringBounds() is another nice one :)