Jan 99 Welcome to UI Design

Gong Xi Fa Cai! from Singapore.

Chinese New Year is upon us again. UIDesign.net is taking a break in the Austrian Alps for a week but not before posting this month's edition.

This month's White Paper entitled "User Interface Analysis" takes a look at how I go about analysing a Domain and System Requirement with the Users for that System. It details 13 techniques for extracting the detail needed to develop a design. This is clearly aimed at those designing custom UI for corporate IT applications. However, you may still find it useful if you design products rather than one-off systems.

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This might be the year of the Rabbit but at Rational Corporation they are rather hoping that it will become the year of the RUP (Rational Unified Process).

This month's UIDesign.net has a distinct UML flavour as we examine the impact that UML and RUP might have on User Interface Design through the IMHO column and the Book Reviews.

User Interface Design and Development and how best it can be done wrt UML and RUP will be a recurring theme for this site over this coming year.

Since last month, Sun have released a bug fix version of the Swing API. This new release has 250 fixes or minor feature requests.

Finally the HTML Component works - yippee! Only 1 year late. They have gone further and added support for multiple lines of text on buttons. How unfortunate they chose to do this by allowing a button to compose an HTML page. Could this be the reason that the working set memory requirement is now 64MBytes? We asked for multiple line text on a button. We didn't need HTML on a button. If we asked for a scooter, its because we needed a scooter, not a 4x4 Quad bike!

Once again Sun give the detractors bullets to fire and once again the credibility of Java for the Enterprise is damaged.

It appears that last month's reviews were well received. Laura Arlov has bravely volunteered to have her book, "GUI Design for Dummies" reviewed. This will be coming along in a future edition.

Meanwhile, this month the book reviews look at User Interface Design on big corporate IT projects. The first is a very recent book which looks at developing software using UML and Rational Unified Process. The second is a slightly older book about Client/Server development.

The 3rd edition of uidesign.net will be posted to the website around March 12th. The March edition will feature a White Paper with more User Interface Patterns and 2 full book reviews which look at covering a breadth of topics in UI Design and Development.