While I am on the topic of UI Design I Palm released their new handset this week called the “Palm Pre” it looks very nicely designed and should be good competition to the iPhone and Android if it works as well is it looks good. Looking though the designs for all the screens published on their website most of it looks nicely designed with a consistent feel, though they are let down in a few places like the calendar month view which is very sketchy compared to other screens. Overall I think they have done a excellent job well worth looking though the images in the more link.

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Today I came across this interesting article “iWork / iLife ’09 UI Roundup” on how Apple has changed the UI look of the applications in the iWork and iLife bundles with the new 09 versions. Anyone who works in the user interface design world knows Apple is often setting the trends that the rest of the industry follows such as glassy/glossy interfaces. So its always interesting keeping a eye on what they are doing.

My colleague Amy Fowler has written a excellent article explaining how layout works and will work in JavaFX. Its great after many months of working on this stuff to see it explained so well. If you have not read it so far and you are interested in JavaFX then what are you doing still reading me waffle, go read it!

Layout Primer for JavaFX1.0 - Amy Fowler

A friend forwarded a email to me a couple days ago from a researcher who wanted to record children sketching on a computer using a graphics tablet. So they could play it back later and watch how they did it etc. It sounded like a cool little app and as I was bored while waiting for a plane back from the IJTC conferance I thought I would have a quick go, how hard can it be

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When I was creating the prize draw application I needed to work out the Spline interpreter numbers to make the names thud down. I ended up using Romain Guy’s Spline Editor for Swing which makes it nice and easy. So thought it was about time we had a JavaFX version, and it could not be too hard. So a couple hours and a couple hundred bind statements later we have a very cool little Spline Editor that lets you edit the spline and see the effect in real time then copy the code to paste into your JavaFX application.

If you would like to try it for your self click here: you can also download the source Netbeans project.