Josh On Design

It's been a while since I've posted thanks to this spring's conference schedule. Part of my new job at Palm is working at our booth answering technical questions. This has kept me on the road, but certainly provided opportunities to talk about our technology and build interest in apps. Read on photos and stories from GDC and CTIA, including a clip of Shrek Cart.

It's been a month since I posted so I'd say it's time for a rant. I've been traveling a lot lately so the object of my wrath this week is alarm clocks. Most specifically the alarm clocks in hotel rooms, but home use clocks don't get off easy either.

Lots of people have opined on Apple's iPad, many deriding it's closed nature and lack of features. The thing is, those problems don't matter to most people. The iPad isn't for you or me. It's for everyone else. I've spent the last 20 years hoping we would have the technology to build such a device, even though I knew it was a device I would not personally use. But that doesn't matter..

After 5 amazing years at Sun I have decided not to move on to Oracle. Instead I will be joining Palm as a developer advocate for the WebOS. The WebOS is an open platform with an exciting future on a variety of Palm devices, which I'll talk about in great detail soon. For now though, I want to talk about Sun, why I'm leaving, and the future of Java & JavaFX.

Tomorrow we will hopefully awake with news of a magical Apple tablet, so tonight I thought I'd give you a few things to read as you drift off to tablet dreamland with touchable sugarplums.

Okay, perhaps that's a bit aggressive. PCs will not go away, much like radio persisted after the advent of television. However, tablets do signal the end of the PC era. Why? Simply because PCs suck. They are heavy, prone to breakage, horribly insecure, and require too much knowledge to keep running. And they were never intended to be used by the vast majority of people who use them today and will use them tomorrow. By the end of this essay I think you'll agree there is a compelling case that the PC era is over and that the growth, and most of the cash, is going to be for tablets and netbooks and other non-PC devices.

You might be wondering where I've been the past few months. JavaFX and Java Store work has definitely heated up, which has taken up the bulk of my time. I've also been working on Project Maitai, a tool for reactive visual artwork, as well as traveling to Sweden to speak at OreDev.

2010 is here and I still don't have my flying car or moon rocket, much less a spaceship en route to Jupiter for some serious monolith research. Sadly, I'll have to be satisfied with some baseless and random speculation on the year to come. Take these predictions with a boulder of salt and me out on them in December.

40+ Vintage Posters to Inspire Your Next Designs Color Palette

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!