Book excerpts:

Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, Second Edition, provides essential information for anyone involved in creating cross-platform GUI (graphical user interface) applications and applets in the Java programming language. In particular, this book offers design guidelines for software that uses the Swing classes together with the Java look and feel.

This revised and expanded edition contains a collection of toolbar graphics, lists of terms localized for European and Asian languages, and an appendix on look and feel switching. New and revised guidelines are provided throughout, and new sections discuss smooth interaction, the use of badges in button graphics, and revised standards for window titles.

Although an application's human interface designer and software developer might well be the same person, the two jobs involve different tasks and require different skills and tools. Primarily, this book addresses the designer who chooses the interface elements, lays them out in a set of components, and designs the user interaction model for an application. (Unless specified otherwise, this book uses "application" to refer to both applets and applications.) This book should also prove useful for developers, technical writers, graphic artists, production and marketing specialists, and testers who participate in the creation of Java applications and applets.

The guidelines provided in this book are appropriate for GUI applications and applets that run on personal computers and network computers. They do not address the needs of software that runs on consumer electronic devices.

This book does not provide detailed discussions of human interface design principles or the design process, nor does it present much general information about usability studies.