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Mar 30, 2022Liked by Steve Hannah

The single biggest benefit of Swing and the single biggest drawback of JavaFX was native look and feel. Swing had it, and the implementation was great. JavaFX doesn't have it. There are a lot of haters that say even swing native L&F looks off, one *could* take care to get a great native experience but that was impossible with JavaFX.

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100% agree. Personally I find that the importance of a native look has diminished over the years, as people have come accustomed to using web apps for almost everything. As long as the UI is responsive and looks nice, I'm happy with it.

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Agreed. People accept the new landscape but I think they don't realize the cost they incur. They constantly context switch between UIs and the learning curve every time they have to pick something new up is enormous compared to times past. On top of that, lots of UX designers take it as a point of personal growth to introduce a never-seen-before UX when really that's one of the worst possible outcomes to the user.

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True. In some ways Swing also gave enough rope to hang yourself. The L&F may have been native, but most apps still paid no attention to UI guidelines. It would have been helpful if there were a few polished Swing app templates that you could use as a starting point, that gave you the full app frame, following all the UI guidelines. Similar to the starting points that Xcode gives.

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