About Kirill

My name is Kirill Grouchnikov and I am a user interface engineer. I have been doing client side development professionally over the last decade or so, in a variety of UI toolkits and libraries that spanned Motif, MFC, VB, Ada, Delphi, Swing and SWT. I currently work at Google on the Android team.

I have a particular interest in creating polished, responsive and well behaving user-facing applications that help the end users achieve their goals quickly and painlessly. Pushing Pixels is where I write about my own explorations of this area.

You can find me on Google+ and Twitter. My GitHub page contains the latest released sources, documentation and build scripts for a number of open-source projects for Java desktop applications that I worked on a few years ago. Those are no longer active. My old blog was on java.net. A trip down the memory lane will show you the list of my old articles and blog entries right here.

Conference presentations – Android

• AnDevCon III ’12 – “Responsive Mobile Design in Practice”. Slidedeck available.
• AnDevCon II ’11 – “Responsive Mobile Design”. Slidedeck available.
• AnDevCon I ’11 – “Designing for the Mobile Form Factor”. Slidedeck available.

Conference presentations – others

• JavaOne ’09 – presenter of the Flamingo: Bringing the Ribbon Component to Swing technical session. Slides can be found here.
• EclipseCon ’09 – presenter of the On The Shoulders of Giants: Harnessing the Power of Eclipse Enterprise Ecosystem session. Slides can be found here.
• JavaOne ’08 – co-presenter of the High Resolution Monitors birds of feather. Slides can be found here.
• OSCON ’07 – presenter of the Advanced Effects in Java Desktop Applications technical session. Slides can be found here.
• JavaOne ’07 – co-presenter of the Bringing Life to Swing Desktop Applications technical session and moderator of the Next-Generation UI Elements for Swing Applications birds of feather.
• DesktopMatters ’07 – “Swing Effects” slides can be found here.
• JavaOne ’05 – co-presenter on BoF that introduced Web Services & XML community at java.net. My part was on the jaxb-workshop project (see below).

Inactive open source projects

Major projects (historical snapshots hosted on GitHub):

• Flamingo – ribbon component for Swing applications
• Substance- a cross-platform look-and-feel for Swing applications. Includes
  • Plugin for SwingX components
  • Plugin for Flamingo components
• Trident - animation library for Java applications. Includes
  • Onyx animation blueprints for Swing
  • Amber media trend analysis

Minor projects (historical snapshots hosted on GitHub):

• Laf Plugin – support for third-party components in look-and-feel libraries
• Laf Widget – support for common “feel” widgets in look-and-feel libraries
• LightBeam – performance benchmark for Swing look-and-feel libraries
• Rainbow – SVG file viewer that illustrates various animation, transition and translucency techniques.
• BindMark – a comparative benchmark for Java XML binding frameworks and libraries
• Checkers – a collection of Checkers games
• Ixent – a framework for non-photorealistic rendering
• JAXB Workshop – a collection of tools for JAXB 2.0 including Eclipse and IDEA plugins for XJC
• Matrix rain – Matrix screensaver for Swing apps
• Strider – ripple effects for Swing applications.
• Trellis – a collection of Tetris-inspired games
• XSOM – XML Schema Object Model (part of JAXB 2.0). I was a small-time contributor.