PLAF!!!

Yes, it's both a sounds made when hurting villains in Batman, and it's also an acronym.  In this case “Platform Look And Feel.”  I bring this up because Java announced a new LAF at their convention called “Ocean.”   It currently looks like:

I've always really disliked how Java UIs tended to look until I saw this.  Very very nice job Sun!  For those who haven't see, the old java “Metal” LAF looked like this:

and

Bleagh.  Fugly.  I hated it.  Luckily on my mac, the Apple engineers implemented a native Aqua LAF so that java swing apps would look like their native counterparts.  I always loved the flexibility that Swing gave you to override the LAF with your own.  It was just unfortunate that the default was so bad.  However, that did create a nice market for ISVs to create LAFs that you could purchase to jazz up your application.  One of my favorite example of this was the Alloy LAF which is used in several popular java applications like JProfiler:

Hopefully now that these client side apps can come OOB with a much nicer feel to them we'll see more penetration of java based apps on the desktop.  Instead of people saying “oh god, why does this look so awful”, they'll be singing praises like “wow! why don't my other apps look this nice?”