Professional Java User Interfaces

Introduction

This introduction is structured as follows:

The interactivity thrill talks about the magic of the first time and other things.

The organization of the book discusses the book's contents and organization.

Book readers and personas provides a more user-centered approach to the contents of the book.

The interactivity thrill

Current software technology allows developers to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for only the cost of the labor, and with greater simplicity than ever before. Despite that, GUIs, and Java GUIs among them, are often totally frustrating and disappointing. In the words of Alan C. Kay^[1]:

"A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too 'easy.' When it was hard to do anything, whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous dissatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the dissatisfaction from self worth – otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results."

Basically, inverse vandals don't care about their work and its impact on the lives of users and the ...