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Userinterface Hints’n Links

After evaluating the result of a user test and changing the whole interface of Caliph & Emir, I’ve got at least some links that might help to build a smooth Java UI:

The very best font site in my opinion is dafont.com. This site is available in English and French and lists lots of free fonts, like BitStream from the Gnome Project. Other sources for free fonts are 1001 fonts, Free Font Snow and Acidfonts. For building images I recommend The Gimp, which is a great free tool, created for Linux and also available for Windows.

If you need really fancy icons the Crystal Clear KDE Icons designed by Everaldo Coelho are a good choice. Other fancy icon sets can be found at Yellow Icon. Another alternative are the Eclipse icons. Therefore you have to download Eclipse and grab the icons from the distribution.

For a better Look of your Java application the JGoodies Look & Feel of Karsten Lentzsch gives a good start. Very nice, but not very cheap is Alloy, which is used in the IDEA Java IDE. Talking about IDEA: Popup and docked windows, as well as the split pane implementation used in IDEA are part of the JIDE Docking Framework.