If you want something that's much closer to proper native, have a look at SWT. It's faster than Swing and actually looks/feels native since it's actually using native widgets. It's really a shame that the poster child application, Eclipse, is so bloated and slow, because people attribute that slowness to SWT when it's really primarily the plugin architecture that's responsible. And I actually find the more spartan developer interface to be more pleasant than Swing, so to me it's win-win. Swing will always have an uncanny valley, SWT has never had that issue, yet still allows you to write for the desktop in only Java.