The two speakers (Pär Sikö, Martin Gunnarsson) showed off an RSS reader (Feedjii) built with Swing which looked a lot like the pimped up applications of Romain Guy. They started off  by presenting some real world examples of horribly looking Swing applications. Then they revealed their recipe for cool looking Swing applications: subtle effects, smooth animations, and custom components. For each ingredient they showed how surprisingly easy it is to implement it. They also covered the area of performance and gave a few hints on making a user interface really smooth. For this, developers have to look into: hardware acceleration flags, timing issues, caching images, image compatibility, and avoiding unnecessary transparency. They didn’t have a lot of material to talk about, though, and after 45 min they already started taking questions. Therefore, on the one hand I got confirmation again that one can build very nice user interfaces with Swing and it is not too hard provided a good UI designer is at hand. On the other hand I was slightly disappointed because I was expecting a lot more. BTW, there is a blog about developing Feedjii and it can be found here: http://www.swing-rocks.com/