I was pleasantly surprised to see the following mention of Desktop Java Live:
April Java Performance Tuning Newsletter In particular, I would wholeheartedly recommend you check out chapter 5 of Scott Delap's book which implements an automatic detector of Swing threading violations - a tool that every GUI developer should include in their everyday development suite.
I look forward to discussing performancing tuning of desktop applications further in future chapters. Topics I'm considering at the moment include JTable cell rendering performance, classloading optimization, and Garbage Collection for desktop applications.