[Yoric]

I was using OWL at the time, which I recall as pretty good.

Swing was nice to program, but had sluggish reaction time and more than a few bugs (speaking of Swing 0.9/1.0, never went much further).

[pjmlp]

OWL was quite good and one of my favourite C++ frameworks, but not something that was being used at my university on assignments that were mostly done on UNIX, which was my point.

[Yoric]

Yeah, under UNIX, the UX landscape was really bad. I think that Qt was available already, but not quite open source.