Josh On Design

I'm thinking of working on another article or two over the next few weeks, but I don't know what to write about. Oh sure, I have lots of ideas, but I don't know what's most interesting to you. Ultimately my writing competes with about 4.8 billion other things for your valuable attention, so I only want to write the things that you want to read. Rather than speculate endlessly about this I've decided to take it directly to the people and have you to vote for your favorite idea.

Here are the rules. You get three votes. Post the three articles you'd like to spend your votes on. You can also make comments, clarifications, or suggestions for other articles, but it's not required. On Monday I'll tally the votes and start a-writin'. Thanks!

Article ideas:

Using the Swing App Framework & Beans Binding Frameworks in NetBeans 6.

There's already some great articles on using the app framework and beans binding (here, here and here) with more probably coming from their respective authors. What would you like me to write about? Some step by step example apps? A complete local database driven app? A webservices driven app (like connecting to weather data, Flickr, or the Google calendar APIs)? Maybe a blog editor that talks to blogger.com or movable-type like blog services? Or perhaps show how to visually build an RSS reader using ROME?

What's new in NetBeans 6.0:

This would be a more general article on what's new in NetBeans 6.0. I would touch briefly on the Swing App Framework and Beans Binding, but also cover general improvements to the editor, the form builder, the bundled database, webstart, and version control improvments. I'll only cover desktop app and general Java development since I'm not as familar with Java EE, profiling, debuggin, UML, JavaME, and the many other things you can do with NetBeans. I'll leave that to other people who are more skilled in those areas.

Using the JXMapViewer:

How to use the JXMapViewer in your own apps. JXMapViewer is a Swing component that lets you embed maps in your application. This will cover basic usage, writing custom overlays with mouseovers and heads up info, hooking into a new mapserver, and binding it to other datasources for mashups. (like my cool weather demo). Anything else you'd like to see here?

Intro to Painters:

Covers both the theory of Painters from SwingLabs, as well as dig down into how they work and some cool things you can do with them (overlays and error indication as well as component skinning). Then finish with a collection of cool painters you can reuse.

Having fun with JavaFX Script.

This article will not go through the language features of JavaFX Script as many other articles have done [see here, here, and here]. Instead this will be task oriented article. I will build several small demo apps, leading up to a full puzzle game with effects, transitions, and scoring.

Graphic Design for the Complete and Utter Engineer.

This article will explain the useful basics of graphic design and give you lots of tips you can use right now to make your apps look better. This article will cover general techniques that apply not only to Swing development, but also Java FX Script, desktop publishing, web design, and pretty much any other place where information is communicated visually. I'll cover color usage, layout, typography, graphics & icons, and most importantly color. And of course color.

*Your Article Here*

Whatever you think would be cool. Solr/Lucene, Slide/Webdav, Http Commons..? The sky's the limit. I really want your ideas and feedback. Thanks.

- Josh