Prototyping / Drawing GUI Screens Question

[BestJewSinceJC]

I'm not sure what forum this fits into, if any, but the program itself is going to be written in Java (not that it matters much). My question is, what is the easiest software to use that I can create a drawing of a GUI with? The GUI I want to draw is going to have tabs, a scroll bar, a file menu, text fields, labels, and check boxes. I'm looking for something that can do this and make it look clean with very little learning curve. Has anyone used anything that fits this description?

[Ezzaral]

Why not just create the GUI itself with Netbeans (or some other GUI tool) and a little bit of dummy data? You don't have to actually wire it up at this point.

[Ezzaral]

This took about 2 minutes to create:

(It actually took longer to screen shot it and get the attachment posted than it did to create it)

[BestJewSinceJC]

I'll try netbeans but I have never used it before. In the past I've done the GUIs by hand. I have probably 15 screens total that I have to do, all of them are more complicated than that... I'll try it out though, if this other tool I found is too hard to use.

[BestJewSinceJC]

Yeah I'm trying it out now. And by trying it out, I mean installing all sorts of stuff first, like a jdk, since I apparently didn't have one before. Lame.

[Ezzaral]

Hope you aren't low on time or disk space ;)

[BestJewSinceJC]

Fortunately it is spring break for me so I have time. Unfortunately it is spring break for me and I am doing school work.

:(

[Ezzaral]

Ouch :(

[BestJewSinceJC]

Yeah, this is definitely a nice tool, but it is also going to take me much longer than 2 minutes per screen. You must have been using netbeans for a while, no?

Also, is there any way to get it so that it doesn't say design preview on the screen? I doubt my professor will care much, but since the screen technically doesn't say that, it'd be nice to get a screenshot that doesn't.

[Ezzaral]

You could run the app :)

[BestJewSinceJC]

Yeah, I should've tried that before asking. I assumed it wouldn't run without any background code for some reason. Question: why does the window look different when I run it than when I do the design preview? I have tabs on there and on the design form, it looks nice, but when I run it, two tabs appear above and two tabs appear below those. On the design, they are all next to each other like I want them to be.

[Ezzaral]

I really couldn't say because it would depend on how/what you set up there. Things do sometimes look different from the design preview at runtime and it just takes some fiddling around if that is the case. All part of the fun :P

[BestJewSinceJC]

I don't know if this will ever be of use to anyone, but if you right click on a JFrame in netbeans, then click properties and set the title, that is the text that will appear by default instead of the default text that Ezzaral and I were talking about before. It's only useful to me since I'm not currently concerned with how the app will actually run, I'm only looking for a nice screenshot.