Dazzle Zone 2.0 Is Here – Now With Extra Dazzle!

Background

It’s been well over a year now since I started Dazzle Zone with starry eyes, excitement and big plans for an awesome blog focusing on UI/UX and the secrets to creating dazzling apps.

I was hoping to post at least fortnightly, include lots of useful samples and really help people with what can be a daunting subject, especially if you are a software developer who rarely works on front-end apps or who doesn’t feel particularly “artistic” or visual-oriented.

Then just as soon as I launched the rocket, it nose-dived and came crashing back down to Earth.  I got sick.  Very sick.  And for more than a year I was in and out of hospitals and only able to tweet occasionally or like and retweet the work of others.

Dazzle Zone lay dormant and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was dead and buried or simply abandoned.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Fortunately my health has recovered, at least to the point where I can re-launch this rocket and make it even greater than my original dream.

The new Dazzle Zone is here and I hope it will become helpful for many people.

What’s New?

1. More frequent posts!  This won’t be much of a challenge given that I had only 1 post in 16 months but now there will be a weekly post titled “The Weekly Dazzle” along with regular articles focusing on one or more aspects of UI/UX.
2. More diverse graphics toolkits to be used for samples.  Rather than focus just on JavaFX (as was the original idea), I realised that I need to expand the toolkits to cover more aspects of UI/UX than are possible with JavaFX alone.  Dazzle Zone 2.0 will now also use Unity and Qt for samples and with those three toolkits, just about every UI/UX feature can be demonstrated.
3. “The Weekly Dazzle” will keep you updated with all the news and new links for UI/UX, JavaFX, Unity & Qt for the previous week so you’ve got it all in one place.
4. An updated About page which outlines the new goals for Dazzle Zone and why I chose these particular toolkits.

What Else?

JavaFX has undergone some significant changes since I first posted and is now looking extremely healthy and being adopted more widely.  This is thanks mainly to Gluon who are actively maintaining OpenJFX and have made the seemingly impossible dream of enabling JavaFX to run on mobiles and tablets a reality.

Unity had to be included in my toolkit selection simply because of its enormous capabilities for producing everything from AAA games to enterprise apps.  I am also a foundation member of GameDevHQ which provides a huge amount of added goodies to get you pumping out amazing creations with Unity.

Check-out the GameDevHQ membership plans and choose to go Pro for a wealth of epic Unity assets, courses and other very useful material.

Qt has been actively developed for 25+ years and is included as a toolkit here because of its versatility and its coverage of devices from small, low-resourced embedded devices all the way up to powerful graphics workstations.  It is very performant on all these platforms and uses C++ for the programming language, JavaScript for scripting and QML for declarative UI specifications.

Qt has an excellent IDE named Qt Creator as well as a 3D Studio enabling creation of a vast array of kinds of applications.

Stay Tuned

You can subscribe to individual posts and/or follow @DazzleZone on Twitter for announcements.

I truly hope that Dazzle Zone will become a vital and very useful resource for anyone involved with UI/UX development.  I welcome comments, both constructively critical and encouraging so please get involved and let’s see where this goes…

Graciously,

John-Val Rose (@Rosethornian)