UI talk from the frozen north

Pushing Pixels, who brought you that interview with Amy Fowler, has another good ‘un, this time with Mikael Grev, a Swedish fighter pilot who also MiG Infocom AB. His company’s best-known product is migcalendar, a very slick offering billed as “the best-selling JavaBean.” Grev’s interview is full of European ambivalence. He’s a Swing developer, but admits that it combines a lot of power with nightmarishly complexity — he likes the comparison to a 747’s control panel, and he’s probably one of the few people equipped to make that comparison. When it comes to JavaFX, he’s guarded — “Another layer? Hiding something under another layer is seldom good” — and unimpressed with the look of Sun’s JavaFX Web site, which is a legitimate criticism of a product offering that’s supposed to be all about the shiny good looks.