JavaFX SDK 1.0 will be released tomorrow, December 4th, 2008, so while we're waiting I thought you might want to learn more about the history of JavaFX and the "contrarian mind" behind it. Al Riske wrote an excellent piece in Sun's "Contrarian Minds" series in which he interviewed Chris Oliver, delving into Chris' background and his role in founding JavaFX. By the way, Chris is the guy on the left in the picture above, presenting JavaFX with Dr. Gosling :-)

How to write Java programs to do things like: * Remove redeye from a photographic image. * Distort the human voice. * Display one image inside another image. * Do edge detection, blurring, and other filtering operations on images. * Insert animated cartoon characters in videos of live humans. If you have ever wondered how to do these things, you've come to the right place.

There’s nothing like the right link at the right time. Remy Rakic (Twitter alias lqd) has left a link to the apparent release jars of JavaFX Desktop 1.0 in the comments on the previous entry. So i’ve decided to see whether there is anything new in the JMC department since the last time i’ve looked at it.

Although this book is already 20 years old, surprisingly the design advices and observations still hold true for software UI today....

Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during the last week:

Want to get up to speed quickly on the JavaFX Script language? Weiqi Gao of Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) has written an excellent article that covers the concepts and language elements of JavaFX Script in a fast-paced but approachable manner. If you've followed this blog or read the first Apress JavaFX Script book, you'll recognize Weiqi as a leader in the JavaFX Script community as well as the Technical Reviewer of the book.

The latest addition in the Flamingo component suite is support for minimizing the ribbon. This has been one of the items on the roadmap for version 4.0 (code named Fainnear), and is now available in the latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo core and 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin.

One on the Mac, and one on the PC. First, the Mac.

PremiumSoft just announced its first public release of Navicat for Oracle Full Versions supporting Mac OS X and Windows. It’s a tool for Oracle administration that allows users to create, edit databases, import/ export data, build report, create/run SQL queries, migrate databases and create reports.

6 facts about Swing every GUI developers should have in mind in this days of incertitude ...

"When Project Nile was launched, me and some others guys complained about lack of open source alternatives in the workflow of creation with JavaFX. So we developed a module inside Inkscape that converts your SVG drawings to JavaFX code."

10 advices you have to follow when you develop Swing application.

Visual Swing Designer for Eclipse is a GUI designer tool, which consists of a set of Eclipse Plug-ins. It aims to provide a Swing designer for Eclipse for Java desktop developers.

So colors have the potential to boost or wreck the user experience. This article will introduce the concept of user experience and highlight some aspects of colors and color perception together with recommendations for UI design.

This multi-level drop down menu script weighs in at only 1.2 KB. It features animation, active header persistence, easy implementation and multiple instance support.

What is JFreeChart? Downloand and Install JFreeChart, how to create Pie, Bar charts in Java App or JSP, Configure Eclipse, NetBeans for JFreeChart, Render Oracle Database Data with JFreeChart.

I've often mentioned the importance of programmers and graphics designers working together to create great looking RIAs. The declarative syntax of JavaFX facilitates this approach, and the "Project Nile" tool available with the JavaFX SDK makes this even easier. Try your hand at the "Breakout" style game that Sten posted on his blog, and then read about how he collaborated with a graphic designer (his four-year-old daughter) to create this game in JavaFX. Sten discusses in his post how he used Project Nile to export graphics-related JavaFX code from Adobe Illustrator using Project Nile.

The latest addition in the Flamingo component suite is support for horizontal scrolling of collapsed ribbon tasks and shrinked task toggle buttons. This has been one of the items on the roadmap for version 4.0 (code named Fainnear), and is now available in the latest 4.0dev drop of Flamingo core and 5.1dev drop of Substance Flamingo plugin.

Get to know sexy administration interfaces hidden here and there on the web!

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.

Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during the last week

iPhone and Adobe Air developers (as well as any others that use SQLite 3) Menial has just released an excellent little app for creating, managing and running queries against SQLite 3 databases called Bases.

Yes, that's a bold statement, but I've waited 13 years to be able to say it. If you've followed this blog or have heard me speak about JavaFX, you know that I was disappointed with the browser wars in the late 90s that fragmented and slowed down the ubiquity of the Java Virtual Machine. Instead of writing rich-client Java applications, the last 13 years of software development has largely consisted of trying to make browsers do what they were never designed to do. If I may speak plainly, the result has been applications that consist of a big mess of varying flavors of JavaScript, HTML, etc. that leave developers overwhelmed and users underwhelmed.

Native Swing was originally an effort to integrate native components, but the scope became broader: by simplifying the addition of web-based components, a whole component suite emerged. Native Swing now integrates native and web-based components.

Code and thoughts on integrating Clojure with BDD