Finally I updated my website theme as it was looking really dated. Its crazy its been 5 years almost to the day since I created the last one. Hope you like the new look 
. Many thanks to Press75 for their great free wordpress theme Seven Five. I only tweeked a few CSS styles added a plugin for the photos page and we are up and running .
Its always nice to see new Swing Look and Feels. Nice looking new theme for Synthetica. Link: Synthetica BlackEye Highlights
Synthetica is based on same Synth Look and Feel that Nimbus is. There are some very neat features which we are supporting in JavaFX like shaped windows and smart backgrounds. Its really nice to seem them available to Swing developers.
Back in the summer while Richard Bair and I were at JavaOne we decided that we should launch a new blog together for all our JavaFX related content. We created fxexperience.com and have started posting lots of interesting blogs there on JavaFX so I hope you will all start following us there. Our aim is to one day make it a invaluable resource for everything JavaFX.
A new Swing GUI builder tool is out in beta called GUIDE. Looking at the videos on the website it looks impressive. Like a more polished version of Netbeans Matisse with some extra goodies.
It seemed like it was time to close the polls, I don’t think there is a clear answer across all platforms. On windows there is a clear winner for the native look and that makes sense as Windows LAF has had a huge amount of work put into it over that last 5 years plus. If there was the resources to put a equal effort into the GTK LAF and a new KDE LAF then they would be clear winners to. Nimbus is a great cross platform look and feel and allows people to create good looking applications but maybe is not the simplest look and feel for people to start with as it takes a little effort to make a great looking application with it. Also it is not the best for compatibility with applications written to work with other look and feels so is a dangerous choice as a default. So I kind of feel that we could go native on Windows and people will be happy but there is no clear answer for GTK and KDE. I will pass the poll results on to the other people who have a say in the decision and see what the consensus is.