ScaleNine

As more people have been visiting ScaleNine, I wonder how many people are using the ScaleNine themes? What are they using them for? Learning, quick theme options to apply to their applications, or maybe a base on top of which they build their own themes?

I’ve come across a few instances where the themes are being used in a variety of ways and it’s great seeing how people are repurposing them to fit their needs. Jason Rubenstein mentioned on Flexcursion how he used the ScaleNine Shadow CSS theme.

How are others using the ScaleNine themes?

Here’s a few examples of some themes being used:

http://flex.maroo.info/

http://www.mikebritton.com/

Aside from being a UI designer, I ocassionally partake in the textile arts (aka screenprinting). I’ve got a 4 color screen printer in the garage, so I thought I’d make an Apollo tshirt. I’ve got the front down (simple). But what should the back say? Hmmmm…

Maybe:

apollo. browser? what browser?

we don’t need no stinkin’ browser.

your/the desktop will never be the same.

get your cursors ready.

get apollo.

design, code, deploy. anywhere.

Those were the first that came to mind. I’m waiting for a blank screen to get here, so I’ve got time to figure it out.

UPDATE: It appears “The web is not enough…” posted by Stefan le Roux and “Desktop 2.0″ posted by Faisal Abid are in the lead with 2 votes each.

I’m going to leave the voting open until Friday the 9th, so it isn’t too late to put your 2 cents in or vote for your favorite.

Also, the winner will get a free shirt (thanks for the suggestion Brent) in dark grey or red.

Now taking orders: http://scalenine.bigcartel.com 

Adobe reported to Macworld.co.uk that Adobe CS3 will be available on March 27th. Hopefully this will bring the connectivity Ryan Stewart mentioned in his ZDnet blog post.

If you’re looking for some fire, smoke and water effects, check out Doug McCune’s blog. As a self-proclaimed Flex Machine, he’s also got some great components put together which you can also find over at flexlib.net. Good stuff.

After hearing about the newest version of Ning’s social network builder I thought I’d give it a try. The social network I made is called “Flexcursion” and it gives you the ability to put faces to the names of other Flex 2 developers, share video demos of your current Flex 2 projects, share screenshots, post articles and a lot more.

I have to say the user experience is really smooth and intuitive. There are limits to the amount of diskspace you can take up, but with the ability to embed videos right from YouTube and images right from Flickr there’s less of risk of taking up the diskspace too quickly.

You check out Flexcursion or join at:

http://www.flexcursion.com

or direct to Ning at:

http://flexcursion.ning.com

With the release of Adobe’s CS3 Suite the workflow for getting graphics from Illustrator into Flex sounds like it’s going to get more streamlined and easier to deal with.

One thing I’d like to see has to do with the management of styles created for a Flex Project with a lot of graphic assets. Currently, after creating SWFs containing all my graphic assets, I create a CSS file which styles all my app’s components.

With larger apps there can be a lot of styled components and a lot of style names to remember. As a time saver I create an MXML file and use it as a “paste board” for all the styled components and icons I’ve made. These components are all stripped down and have styling attributes and a name attribute applied to it. That’s it.

The time saving comes in when I need a styled component. I go to my “paste board” MXML file and just copy and paste the styled component wherever I need it in my app. Then I’ll apply sizing and other attributes. It makes for a lot less things to remember and less keystrokes.

I know there is a style drop down in the “Flex Properties” panel of the Design View, but it only gets populated when your viewing an Application MXML file.

This tactic got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a “Styles” palette like there is in Photoshop? It would load in visual representations of your created styles from CSS files inside your Flex Project. Then, when you need to style a component, just select a component and then click on a style inside the “Styles Palette” and your component gets styled. Or drag a style onto the component you want to style.

The other option would be a text based list of your created styles. You could expand each item to reveal the CSS attributes and edit them if necessary or apply a selected style to a component. I think there was something like this in Flex Builder 1.

I think this could help more designers warm up to Flex. There wouldn’t be a need to even look at the MXML, worry about where that component is in the MXML, or where to put that “roundedCorners” attribute. It’s all visual.

This might be wishful thinking and a bit overkill, but I know it would be a feature that could save me tons of time. Until then, I’ll keep using my “paste board” tactics.