The screenshot above is from Anthony Rogers’ blog (UI designer for the tool), and the next one is from Chris Oliver’s blog, who successfully managed to hide away from most of the geek crowds at JavaOne.

The design of the tool is looking really nice and clean, the timeline reminds me a bit of the Adobe Premiere CS4 one. But unlike Premiere or Flash CS4, one interesting design choice is the lack of row headers to identify the different elements or categories for the rows in the timeline. This makes it look a bit cleaner and less cluttered, but it would be interesting to see if this doesn’t make it more difficult to track just what it is you are supposed to be controlling in that part of the timeline. Hard to tell without trying the tool of course (hint, hint, Sun … available for alpha/beta testing!).

I haven’t seen a single bit of code in any of the screenshots/demos so far. I wouldn’t be surprised that there was some script text area somewhere, or maybe the expectation is that for code you go to a tool like Netbeans?

Tor Norbye also provides some additional information about the tool, it will be available as a webstart application that will let you save data in the “cloud” (like Google Docs) or locally, as well as run the tool online/offline.

Chris calls it the JavaFX Design tool, others the JavaFX Authoring tool, for sure neither of these is the final name for the product but I’m still a bit surprised it doesn’t seem to have any sort of funky codename at this point.

You can watch some short videos of the tool in action here.

During this morning’s JavaOne general session, the “James Gosling’s Toy Show”, Tor Norbye gave another preview of the “JavaFX Authoring Tool” (TODO: Needs a cool codename!!!).

In 2007 when I blogged about the original JavaFX announcement at that year’s JavaOne, one of my first questions was about the tooling. At first we basically just had JFXPad to play around, then came more integration with Netbeans. However, these are not designer tools, and a RIA application needs more access points of people who are not software developers. This was partially answered with the JavaFX plugins for tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but what was really missing was a visual place to bring content together interactively and created animated content.

So now we see glimpses of the JavaFX authoring environment that Sun plans to release. The tool seems to be in the early stages of development and it is unclear when it will be released. However, some of the features look very compeling and familiar. Like any of the versions of the Adobe Flash tools, it features a timeline with the ability to edit key frames and create animated transitions. It also allows you to drag and drop media and JFX components (including the new 1.2 controls) to compose your app.

The coolest feature is that the tool aims to deliver on the “multiple screens” theme of JFX, you can easily output your project for a JFX desktop application, mobile and the plan is to have output for TV applications.

The following videos demonstrate the basics of the tools …

And this next video features the visual binding feature that allows you to graphically bind properties between target and source objects, with inline display of the properties.

The tool looks nice, but it’s too early to compare it to any of the equivalent Adobe or Microsoft tools. To me this type of tool is key to adoption, so I wish the team the best of luck and that they hopefully find an effective way to get feedback via previews just do sanity checks on the tool (hint, hint, I wouldn’t mind preview access

One final note, I think there’s a need for a JFXMattise like tool. I don’t know if this tool is it, I don’t think so. Basically, maybe a subset of this tool, embedded in Netbeans that allows developer type people to visually compose their JFX applications, with an emphasis on visual UI control and layout composition. As it stands, I think there’s a big gap there even if this tool is released.

Update 1: I added another video showing how you can edit “multiple screens”. That is, tweak your JFX application in other devices with different resolutions out of a main project. In this case, you can have this full resolution application with several smaller windows targeted for mobile devices. The cool thing is that you can tweak one of the target devices to say have less buttons so it can still be tailored for other platforms.

Also Tor has posted a blog entry about the tool (which is the current project he’s working on).

Update 2: New screenshots of the JavaFX Design Tool