On Friday, we looked through some of your mockups in class. Now, you get to write a Java application that implements the program you mocked up. Your goal should be to write a program that is as easy and pleasant to use as possible. We're not focusing on complex feature sets for this assignment. Instead, we're focusing on (1) learning how to use Java Swing to do GUI programming, and (2) how to design a clean and intuitive interface that achieves (simple) user goals.
Your job is to write a Java program using Swing GUI elements to implement a functioning GUI for the application you mocked up. Hand in via the Courses folder a folder called "gui" containing all your .java files, any data files used by your application, and a readme.txt file describing the status of your program, how to compile and run it, and anything else you want me to know.
The things I'll be looking for in these programs include:
Because we're not focusing (yet) on making the feature sets sophisticated, you should feel free to use simple data files to store data. For example, if you wanted to write a real weather program, you would want to figure out how to contact real weather sites on the network and extract the information you need from them. But for this assignment, you might alternatively create fake weather information and store it in a text file, or use a random number generator to create random data on the fly. We'll talk more about this on Monday.
On Monday and Wednesday next week we will spend about half our time looking more closely at Java and Swing, and about half our time discussing the chapters from About Face 3 and general interaction design concepts.
Some links that might be helpful: