JavaOne 2007 – Day Two
My second day at JavaOne started off with Joe Winchester, one of the most entertaining speakers at this conference. I still remember last year’s session: first, I helped to prepare one of the demos and all sorts of technical issues came up during this but eventually we managed to get it running; secondly, it was standing room only and Joe drew many laughs with his presentation. This year’s presentation was about “User Interfaces: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly“. Basically, it was along the same line as last year’s presentation. Joe is brilliant in finding all sorts of user interface screw-ups. After the session he told me that he is not actively looking for this but just stumbles over them while browsing. He started his talk with some remarks on the paper-based view of the world. WYSIWYG still dominates the design of most user interfaces but also limits their design. Jeff Raskin, the creator of the Macintosh, hated this view. He compared it to a Boeing 747 with its wings ripped off and used as a bus. Joe then made fun of desperate attempts of developers to cover up their mistakes, like using animation to distract the user from a slow and unusable user interface. He also demonstrated some progress bar examples which just kidded the user (without the developer’s intention). The culmination of his talk were two videos about the user interface of a scale in the fruit/vegetable department of a supermarket. The first video showed Joe trying to weigh some bananas and the scale keeps telling him that it can’t do it because it is out of stock which slightly contradicted the fact that Joe put real bananas on the scale. In the second video Joe tried to weigh some tomatoes on the same scale and the scale asked him what kind of tomatoes he has got and for each variance showed him exactly the same picture. At the end Joe called out at the Web developers to get serious after having more than enough fun. What I missed in his talk were solutions to the problems he showed. Joe told me afterwards that he still had one third of the slides left at the end, so maybe he could have talked about these solutions. Overall, the session was well above average, but I think it was not as good as last year’s session. It also drew less attendees than last year which is true for all the sequels I have seen so far.
The next session titled “Filthy Rich Clients: Talk Dirty to Me” was held by Chet Haase and Romain Guy. They claimed that this is a presentation based on a book based on a presentation. Hence, rather than wait for their book “Filthy Rich Clients” one could get a good overview of their ideas about pimping up a Swing GUI. I first expected something like “Extreme GUI Makeover” but soon realized that this was just the low-level version of this session. They talked about different approaches in achieving better GUI performance. The timing framework developed by Chet Haase was another topic. Most time was spent on how to achieve coolness, like blur, drop shadows, spring, morphing etc. I didn’t mind the low-levelness of this talk but it was kind of boring. Romain tried to make some jokes which did not catch on but maybe it was still too early in the morning for him or the audience or both.
“Extreme GUI Makeover 2007” was the second sequel of the well-known user interface presentation by Romain Guy and his colleagues. As with most movies after too many sequels this show is getting a bit long in the tooth. This time they chose to enhance a “real” business application, in this case a real estate application. After some minor improvements to the application’s appearance such as changing the look and feel, adding customized components and a nice splash screen they showed off some impressive changes to a table. Their cell renderer was quite complex and included pictures, several lines of text and spanning. The coolest feature was their sorting animation which visualized how rows changed their position when being sorted. They also created an out-of-the-frame non-rectangular and transparent window which tracked the current selection in the table like a kind of tooltip. Finally, Romain demonstrated how to convey exceptions to a user in a funny way (how about developers covering up their mistakes). He created an animation which ripped off the surface of the window and showed the ugly internals of the application which had gone wrong. To summarize, I think they should not try to create another sequel next year but come up with something completely different.
This day’s sessions were informative and sometimes entertaining. However, I was missing last years’ excitement. Maybe cool Java desktop applications are becoming just normal which is a good sign.
