I've spent a goodly amount of time recently surveying client side technology. There's a number of things coming up personally, and professionally at Propylon that will involve UI work other than web interfaces. Generally we're adopting XUL/Mozilla at work, but I've been playing with Swing, WinForms, SWT, OpenOffice, WxPython over the last couple of months as well trying to nail down some choices. And then two of my colleagues, Praveg and Tommy, pointed me at DB Designer 4. It's an open source database design and modelling tool targeted primarily at MySQL. DB Designer is a beautiful application - visually elegant, clean, responsive, consistent. It's intuitive - it mostly does what you expect it do. It also has a extremely good visual modelling space. The last time I responded this positively to an application was probably IntelliJ IDEA or Mozilla mail. So given my current investigations, I had to go and get the source for this thing. And it's built on Delphi. Which has served me a timely dope slap: it's the interface, stupid. Somewhere along the way I'd forgetten that toolkits come second to usability....
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