Cooking With LWUIT Preview

Inspiration is powerful stuff, Kirill's blog often inspires and educates me (highly recommended even for non-Swing developers his blog is very informative on all things GUI). This past week he featured an excellent series covering the subject of creating a UI from a photoshop mockup, this is a remarkably common task with very little coverage especially when considering the amount of times we get asked to perform this task.

Rather than just pick up any application Kirill focused on an application that never really existed and has an imaginative mockup photoshop UI, he did an impressive job in showing off the power of his excellent (and gorgeous) Swing Substance Look And Feel. Can something like this be done in LWUIT???

No.

Sort of... Maybe. But not quite.

The UI is remarkable in its use of textures which have rather elaborate underlying special effects not really feasible on a phone what we can do is "cheat", we can use pre-rendered textures to reach a very similar effect. We also need to adapt the UI which just won't fit on even the largest phones available...

Unlike Kirill's series which deals with replicating 1 to 1 the photoshop design, this series is geared towards adapting an existing design used in applications or websites in order to move it to the cellular environment. I will write more about this in the next post and explain some of what I did but for now enjoy the teasers, a screenshot of the cookbook UI in LWUIT and the original cookbook image.

BTW any artifact you may see in the LWUIT image is purely my bad skills at gimp/photoshop shining through... I needed to do some cleaning up of the images and without a graphics department for this blog the quality leaves something to be desired ;-)