Java chat client GUI advice

I'm looking for some guidance or just ideas here. We designed a basic/small Java chat client/server with a GUI. I'm thinking about developing this a bit further for fun.

I'm hitting a dead end with listing the us开发者_运维百科ers though. I would like a nice, clean list of your friends. With online/offline status and so on (even if its just a change in colour of the text). Maybe right click to whisper.

Anyone have any thoughts/ideas to help?

Use a custom JList cell renderer with appropriate JLabel and/or any other swing component. See example here

I did this as my first Java project. My source code and executable are up for downloads.

Here Source and Jar Executable