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Jonathan Simon

Jonathan Simon is a developer and author specializing in user interaction. He is currently heading up the user interface effort for Firethorn, a startup developing a J2ME-based mobile banking application. In a previous lifetime, Jonathan designed and developed mission-critical financial trading clients for Wall Street investment banks. He has written extensively about his experiences here at java.net, as well as for IBM DeveloperWorks, JavaWorld, Addison Wesley and O'Reilly. He is especially interested in interaction design and data visualization with an emphasis on the access and presentation of information to improve the user experience. An avid percussionist, composer, and electronic musician, Jonathan spends most of his non-working hours on the drums laying down the funk or otherwise making really cool noises.

 

jonathansimon's blog

Community One, a shock about NetBeans, and a dose of humor

Posted by jonathansimon on May 8, 2007 at 1:52 PM EDT
I actually ended up spending a lot of time in the NetBeans sessions yesterday (much to my own surprise). The first demo that impressed the hell out of me was Josh Marinacci's demo at the end of the NetBeans 6.0 general session.

How I got here

Posted by jonathansimon on May 7, 2007 at 5:08 PM EDT

So I’m sitting here on the bean bag chairs at Muscone, getting ready to go to a bunch of talks and hang with java peeps this week. I made a pretty big technical switch recently - moving to J2ME from Swing. Before the insanity starts for the week, I wanted to share a little about my experiences, and how I got here to give everyone a little context on my experience.

Heading to JavaOne!

Posted by jonathansimon on May 4, 2007 at 1:07 PM EDT
It's been a long time since I made a public appearance here at java.net, so first let me fill everyone in on my whereabouts. I've been quiet as I recently shifted my focus from Swing to J2ME.

Hey, Jonathan... where you been?

Posted by jonathansimon on July 18, 2006 at 5:35 PM EDT
Howdy.

I've been quiet at Java.net for a while and I wanted to fill in a few gaps. A few months ago, I went through with a few major life changes that had been in the works. I ended my 6 year career on Wall Street -- opting for a change -- and moved to sunny Phoenix, AZ. Change I got!

Killing your users

Posted by jonathansimon on March 14, 2005 at 3:08 PM EST

I sent the googlezon movie John Mitchell posted on his blog last week to a few friends. My wife thought it was pretty cool/scary/etc and started some snooping in her down time.

Bad Design

Posted by jonathansimon on February 4, 2005 at 1:30 PM EST

I went against my environmental concience this morning and decided to print out a manual. That said, I didn't want to waste too much paper, so I gave a shot at minimizing paper usage. I figured I would print 2 pages per printed page, and I would print double sided. Not bad, cut the page count down by 4.

A death march to the tune of 1/2 billion dollars and US national security

Posted by jonathansimon on January 14, 2005 at 10:34 AM EST

I've seen my share of death march projects, we all have (there are alot of them after all). What's amazing to me is not that they exist, but rather the sheer quantity and magnitude of them.

Refactoring can be a dangerous word

Posted by jonathansimon on January 5, 2005 at 5:08 PM EST

I am on one of those projects where I try to introduce XP practices like lightweight documentation and testing. I also happen to work at a large wall street investment bank with alot of money at stake. And as a result -- a pretty stressful and politically charged environment.

Paul Graham and Java?

Posted by jonathansimon on November 29, 2004 at 2:39 PM EST

Is Paul Graham, a very open and strong opponent of Java, using it himself? Well, not exactly.

But Paul Graham's former company ViaWeb that was sold to Yahoo is. The last issue of Swing Sightings points to the Java based Yahoo site builder application for small business.

Sun's MP3 Plugin released!

Posted by jonathansimon on November 11, 2004 at 7:19 PM EST

Got an email from the former JavaSound team (i.e. Florian) mentioning that Sun finally got their acts together and released an MP3 plugin.

Apparently, it works with JMF as well as JavaSound. Apprently, this was blessed by Sun as they solved whatever legal issues were pressing.