Josh On Design

As many of you may know, user interface design is a passion of mine. I want software that both looks pretty and acts well. I've had lots of ideas on the topic, often bleeding over into art and traditional design, in addition to usability. After thinking about it for a couple of years I've finally decided to create a blog dedicated to the topic: www.joshondesign.com

An essay in which I expound upon the benefits of the lowly wire and resist the temptation to wireless-ize the world of personal gadetry.

Who am I? Or, perhaps more importantly, why should you care what I say about design. Why don't I address the former question first in hopes that you forget about the latter.

If you've found this site you probably came from one of my technical blogs on Java, JavaFX or fun JavaFX demo. First let me say: Welcome! I'm glad you are joining me in what I hope will be a fun and engaging site. This post is the first of what will be many posts and essays on the topics of design, usability, and aesthetics. So let me dive in and tell what this is all about.

One of the big announcements at JavaOne was the Java Store. I'm especially proud of it because I've been secretly working on the project for the past few months. Since the announcement I've gotten a lot of questions on the store and how it relates to the rest of the Java ecosystem. To supplement the excellent FAQ I thought I'd answer a few questions.

Technically I'm on vacation this week so don't mention this post to my boss. I simply couldn't wait to blog about cool stuff we put into JavaFX 1.2. Shhhhh!

I've just arrived in SF for my fourth JavaOne conference. Despite the usual chaos this year's prep has gone very well. We have a ton of new things to show you. Most importantly we have the new release of JavaFX. As previously noted it has REDACTED, and REDACTED as well as greater REDACTED to make your apps run. Which, as you can imagine, is totally awesome. And of course the big news is support for REDACTED and REDACTED, as you can see in the screen shot below:

I don't normally post about job offers, but this one is simply too cool to pass up. The guys at Limewire are looking to hire a new Swing developer. For those of you who don't know, Limewire is the premier peer-to-peer file sharing client on the Interwebs. These guys have been doing killer Swing GUIs for a long time and even inspired some of the hacks the book Chris and I wrote. If hired, you'd get to work on their audio player and develop a new video player for the Limewire client. Sounds like a dream job.

A lot has happened since I last blogged. The JFXStudio hit 33k hits with 50 posts, I've started working on a new secret project built with JavaFX, and we had a rockin' booth at SXSW last week. I'll cover SXSW and our new party app in another blog soon. First things first: Developer Challenges!

Today I'm pleased to announce a new experimental site a few of us have been working on called the JFXStudio (www.jfxstudio.org). It's a site specifically for sharing your JavaFX creations. The JFXStudio is not meant to be an app-of-the-day kind of site, or a showcase for polished apps. It's a place where you can show off your doodles and works in progress. And it's a place where you can get great feedback on your JavaFX creations. Think of it as a Flickr or DeviantArt for JavaFX instead of images. Go check it out at www.jfxstudio.org. We've pre-seeded the site with creations from 6 prominent JavaFX bloggers (like the one below) and we can't wait to have more submissions.

I know I haven't been blogging, twittering, or doing the FaceBook very much lately. That's because I've been very, very busy working. As we promised last summer, the next release of JavaFX coming out soon. For desktop developers you won't notice too many changes, mostly bug fixes (and a feature or two). The big news is that this will be our first release with full mobile support. Of course this really isn't news either, since it's what we promised last summer. In fact, mobile support has been the driver for this release. Pay attention for news coming out soon with the details. So with no news for you, why am I writing this blog?...

I'm in the London airport awaiting my flight back home. After an exhausting week at Devoxx it will be good to be home and on vacation until the end of the year. And what a year it has been. At JavaOne we showed new JavaFX features and gave a roadmap for the JavaFX preview and final release. Now, six months later, we have hit every milestone and JavaFX 1.0 is out for the world to play with and build on. It feels immensely satisfying (and tiring) to have the bits out there.

First I'd like to thank The Hoosiers; a British band who, for reasons inscrutable to man, formed in the American midwest.

Why do I have a bad 80s song in my head.

Last week I gave two sessions on JavaFX at the OreDev conference in Malmo, Sweden (sorry guys, I don't know how to put the dots over the 'o' with my english keyboard). I had a wonderful time. This is one of the most organized and well designed conferences I've ever been to. The speakers were treated very well with shuttles to the conference, a tour of the city, and even a special dinner in the history city hall building with the deputy mayor.

I have been extremely remiss in my blog posting. A quick glance at Java.net says that my last post was August 26th. Well, my only excuse is that I've been mad busy working on the JavaFX SDK. Launching a new platform is a big deal, with many tiny details to be taken care of. I'm heading up the samples and demos effort to make sure we have lots of great sample code for you to learn from. As you can imagine that's taken pretty much all of my time. It'll be over soon, though. The end of fall approaches. :) And once we release the SDK I'll have tons of things to post about (after a much desired vacation).

In part one of this series I showed you how to set up a loading image, including an animated spinner gif. In this part I'll show you how use a screenshot or poster frame to speed up page loading.

You may have heard that JavaSE 6 update 10 is supposed to improve the experience of applets. You may have even seen the demos of dragging and dropping applets out of the webbrowser, but there's a lot more to it than that. In this series of blogs I'll show you how to get the most out of deploying your applets, even if you aren't using Update 10.

The initial JavaFX Preview SDK release has gone pretty well. There were a few snafus and broken links, but overall it has gone pretty smoothly for a first preview release. As we plan our next steps I thought I'd ask you all a question. In fact, I'm going to abuse the great power of my blog (2^-3 power, to be exact) by begging. So this is a blog beg, or bleg: what samples do you want to see?

Whew! Our launch of the JavaFX Preview SDK yesterday went pretty well. Only a few broken links which have since been fixed. After waking up at 5:30 am to turn on the new sites I spent most of the day monitoring weblogs and answering questions. It was a pretty good turnout, with most developers reacting positively to the SDK. Here's a quick rundown of things you might have missed.