Josh On Design

Typography is the study of

Listening to some podcasts about mobile devices I heard over and over statements like "iPhone changed the world with multi-touch" and "Android could compete with Apple if it had multi-touch." This simply isn't true. Okay, while perhaps not a lie, the success and value of of multitouch is extremely overrated. In fact, the iPhone barely uses multi-touch!

I was in Sweden all of this past week for the OreDev conference. I had a wonderful time last year and made it first on my list to see again. The attendees are friendly and their technologies diverse, making it such a good learning environment. I was especially pleased to see they have added an entire track on User Experience. What follow's is OreDev's take on the future of user experience design, from the visualization technologies coming out of Microsoft Research, to a brief history of touch interfaces, to the latest rapid development technologies for mobile devices.

I had hoped to have my next tutorial article done by now but, alas, travel and JavaStore deadlines snuck up on me. I'm currently flying to Sweden for the annual OreDev conference.

Color is important. We see in color. Different colors make us feel different ways, or remember different things. Most companies take their colors very seriously. Coca-Cola red is trademarked color. Pantone has copyrighted their color sets. The Brits feel it necessary to add an extra letter to their colours. Color is powerful but also dangerous. One false step and your carefully crafted website could look like this.

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.