BosIT

Although I found the Ocean look to be a major improvement of the Metal look and feel (L&F), Nimbus seems a big step forward once again. And not an unwelcome one at that.

It does deserve to be said that a project with a Swing frontend I’ve been working on for a client for sometime now has been running Ocean as default look for a while now. It’s primary user group are users with no technical expertise whatsoever, and after I disabled the native theme for a while to do some Vista testing and forgot to re-enable it later for the next release build, they’ve specifically asked me to switch back to Ocean afterwards when I had ‘corrected’ the issue. I still need to ask whether that was due to use of colors, font, dpi or messy Swing native theming.

Which brings up a question that crossed my mind a few times; how many or few colors can/should a business app gui use in it’s UI, before it gets that screaming feeling or transforms to the written equivalent of The Box Factory?

Since I try to adhere to splitting the layers and reusing components (sort of), the use of color seems pretty important when designing editors and viewers of different sorts. I suppose it should all be abstracted out to the presentation model right