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Re: Designing GUIs: reall

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Michele wrote:

> I read on the web that NetBeans is better than Eclipse in designing GUIs.
> Do you confirm this?

No. Netbeans contains a free visual editor that seems to attract
more people than previous visual tools that shipped with Netbeans.
However, there are downsides with this editor and the layout manager
(GroupLayout) it has been built for.

First, there's the risk of a vendor lock-in, if your designs require
a specific IDE to be maintained now, or more important, in the future.
The underlying GroupLayout is difficult to edit by hand. For the current
GroupLayout there are both free and commercial ports for other IDE;
where my favorite is the one in the JFormDesigner, a great visual tool.

The vast majority in everyday design is based on grids and even more
on grid systems. And this is how humans have designed since the very
beginning of design, thousands of years before. Grids help you find
good design, grid systems can significantly reduce design costs and
increase the design consistency. This becomes more important when the
amount of screens you design increases, and it can turn into a design
success factor if you have over 100 screens.

GroupLayout has no means to benefit from a grid system. It's been
designed to make a single layout good. But if you have more than one
layout, these are not related in GroupLayout. Hence you typically
end up with inconsistent design, and need to repeat the design process
for every individual layout/screen.

How can professional designers create a bus schedule so fast and
with such a high degree of consistency? They follow a meta design
(also: design modules) that in turn is built upon a grid system.
How would a bus schedule look like when built with GroupLayout
and how much would it costs to design every indivisual page?

You can find more information about grids and grid systems in
"Grid systems in graphic design" by Josef Mnller-Brockmann and
in "The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems" by the same author.
I provide a presentation about meta design techniques in Swing, see
"Efficient Swing Design" at www.jgoodies.com/articles/

-Karsten

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Designing GUIs: really be "Michele" <michele@THRWHITE.remove-dii-this> - 2011-04-27 15:48 +0000
  Re: Designing GUIs: reall "RedGrittyBrick" <redgrittybrick@THRWHITE.remove-dii-this> - 2011-04-27 15:48 +0000
    Re: Designing GUIs: reall "RedGrittyBrick" <redgrittybrick@THRWHITE.remove-dii-this> - 2011-04-27 15:48 +0000
  Re: Designing GUIs: reall "David Segall" <david.segall@THRWHITE.remove-dii-this> - 2011-04-27 15:48 +0000
  Re: Designing GUIs: reall "Karsten Lentzsch" <karsten.lentzsch@THRWHITE.remove-dii-this> - 2011-04-27 15:48 +0000

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