I was just doing some spring cleaning on my bookmarks list and I rediscovered a couple of interesting sites. These sites were useful to me while doing user interface design at work this past year.
At the time, I was working my way through Filthy Rich Clients, which is a book about doing amazing things with Swing. If you do any Swing development, definitely put Filthy Rich Clients on your reading list. Even if you've been using Swing for years, you'll learn many great techniques that will make your user interfaces put these fancy AJAX websites to shame.
The first website I wanted to share is ColorSchemer. This utility was directly recommended from the pages of Filthy Rich Clients. If you've ever been searching for just the right color(s) to use for your website or application, go check this out. It helps you generate good looking color schemes. And, if you're a little lazy like me, you can take advantage of the color schemes that others have already shared.
The second website I wanted to share is GUIdebook. This site has several screenshots from old versions of operating systems and applications. It helped me because I wanted to borrow some user interface controls that I remembered from an old version of Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, this site doesn't have a whole lot of content, but I really like the concept. It's definitely worth a peek, if for nothing more than nostalgia. Please, let me know if you know of something better.