Corporate design guidelines aim at ensuring a coherent and consistent corporate identity. User interface guidelines (or UI guidelines) work in a similar fashion. They provide a set of rules for designing a software’s user interface. This applies to visual design as well as to interaction design. Ideally, adhering to these rules guarantees a basic quality of applications that run on the same operating system and avoids an “application zoo”-scenario.

A Java™ developer who is used to developing GUIs with Swing and who is now trying to get into Android might be surprised: Java is not the same on Android.

The fact that Java is different on Android has been discussed in some blogs on the net already, so I just sum it up to this: Android applications can be written by any developer who knows the Java programming language. But the number of available runtime classes on Android is different: there are fewer classes in Android regarding package java.* compared to Sun Java Standard or Micro Edition. The most surprising fact for a Java GUI developer might be that there is no Swing on Android.

This article demonstrates some aspects of how a simple Java Swing application with a nice Look and Feel was transferred to Android. The main focus is set on how to write the application with the Android SDK and the styling and theming abilities of Android.

After dealing with general market trends in part 1 of this blog series this second and final part provides a more detailed comparison of Google Android and JavaFX.

Centigrade specializes in creating GUIs, in many projects with a particular focus on the implementation of Java Swing based GUIs for desktop applications. With the advancement of the mobile market, it is an obvious step for Centigrade to also have a look at Java based mobile GUIs. This article gives an overview on the mobile market today and includes a comparison of the two major Java players in that sector, Google Android and JavaFX.