Are there any polished, commercial, Swing desktop apps?

Question

We know that nice looking desktop applications can be produced with SWT; there are Eclipse and Vuze as example. But are there any comparable examples of commercial desktop apps written in Swing?

thanks,

Joe

Answer 1

Check out the Netbeans platform's gallery page:

• http://platform.netbeans.org/screenshots.html

Palantir comes to mind as far as nice looking Swing applications go. They have a blog as well:

• http://blog.palantirtech.com/

Also check out Romain Guy's blog. He used to post about any cool looking swing apps he found:

• http://www.curious-creature.org/

Edit: Collapp looks really nice, but it's unreleased as of yet:

• http://dlemmermann.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/collapp-collaborative-project-planning/

Answer 2

A lot of Oracle's peripheral tooling (for example the designer from OWB) is done in Java and uses Swing UI components.

Answer 3

If you name Eclipse for SWT then "IntelliJ IDEA" fits your description: it's a Java IDE that has a cult following (there used to be armies of developers shelling out $499 to buy the commercial IntelliJ IDEA even tough both Eclipse and NetBeans were free, which speaks a lot about IntelliJ's quality). It's a Swing app (and now there's a free community edition) and it has a very very polished (Swing) UI.

Answer 4

Not a specific utility, but Nimbus is a non-native new look and feel. A demo is available from the project homepage.

View more details courtesy of Jasper Potts' blog

There are some good examples out there.

Answer 5

In my opinion, JAlbum uses a Swing UI. Another useful resource is JGoodies, which provide some swing applications which are really polished and proof that swing is neither ugly nor slow.