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.
Articles
Do you prototype your GUIs? Should you? A great prototype can help work out the kinks in the flow of a GUI. But it can also get rushed into production as a seemingly (but not really) ready product, if you do too good a job of showing how your app will work. In this installment of "Interaction...
Some applications make perfect sense to the developer, but not to the end user. Are you thinking of your GUIs in terms of what the developer needs, what the application needs, or what the user needs? In this installment of "Interaction Happens," Jonathan Simon shows how to "think holistically"...
Users of desktop applications are demanding--something as simple as a misplaced or misaligned pixel is unacceptable to some users. So it's up to you to get things exactly right. But is this practical, and how do you do it? Jonathan Simon shows a process for analyzing, coding, and testing your...
Multi-tier systems can create chicken-and-egg headaches--how do you develop a client when the back end's not ready? If the servers are expensive and difficult to set up and maintain, how do you keep them up and running for development? Jonathan Simon says: you don't. Instead, you simulate parts...
It's difficult to expose GUI components to testing, and in the worst case, tightly coupled components aren't seen or tested until their surrounding application is ready. Jonathan Simon says there's a better way, and it's called the "simulator."
Dealing with potentially slow actions like network activity or database access in Swing GUIs generally leads to an unresponsive GUI or unreadable code. Jonathan Simon presents a new event-driven approach that can fix both.
Instead of using XML to script your Java applications, consider using an actual scripting language, such as Jython.
