GUI Suggestions??

[Eibhlin Reid]

Hi there,

I'm creating an application similar to LavaSofts Adware remover Adaware, but I'm really bad at doing GUI stuff, it always looks very basic. This is for my final year project in college and I would really appreciate it if anyone has any suggestion on what I could use to create a nice GUI.

Is there some plugin that I can use to change the look-and-feel of the application for example??

Thanks in advance!

[Joel McNary]

Yes, Java (Swing) does support pluggable-look-and-feels. Javatoo contains a fair number of available ones (most are even free/open source). Googling a bit (or reading the documentation on some of those) will provide instructions on how to set it.

That said, How do you get less "basic" GUIs? My suggestions: use the GridBag layout as much as possible (Google for Grigbag Tutorial if you need to), and use an IDE to design the GUIs. (NetBeans has a nice GUI builder, but Jigloo is looking promising as a plug-in for Eclipse. I don't know about the GUI capabilities of other IDEs.)

These are my two cents.