Just wanted to send out a quick note that I’ve made the winning themes of the “Skin to Win Challenge” available for download. Not all of them included source files for the artwork, but you can grab the skins and CSS to use in your own applications. Get them from the Gallery
I’ve also revised the homepage to list the winners and feature the themes of the top 3 prize winners. Stay tuned for more themes from all the other entrants.
Before we get into the winners, let me just say that the response to this contest exceeded the expectations of Adobe, EffectiveUI and myself. We got 27 total entries and enough to make it really hard to pick the final winners. That also means 27 more themes for people to access here on ScaleNine, so thanks to everyone who submitted.
Now, on to the winners. Oh, and if you don’t remember what each of the prizes were, you can refresh your memory here. With one exception. Initially, some of the prizes included Adobe Creative Suite 3 software, however, since Creative Suite 4 was just released, Adobe isn’t going to send you on your way with old software. Winners will now be getting CS4 software instead of CS3!
Ok, really, on to the winners.
Alberto did an awesome job of creating a really tight theme and paid attention to pixel by pixel details. As one judge put it:
I must say, [ this ] is some tight skinning. And although I have never agreed with the half-rounded half-rectangular aesthetic, this guy makes it look acceptable. He brings a designer’s eye to the developer’s table, in terms of his implementation of pixel-level precision and design consistency.
You can check out Alberto’s theme here. Congratulation’s Alberto!
I can tell you that it was a battle for first place between Nahuel’s entry and the winner. Judges found this entry both interesting and polished. Several were interested to see some of the technical detail that also went into the entry with some of the custom Flex code that came along with it.
You can check out Nahuel’s theme here. Congratulation’s Nahuel!
Phil did a great job of mixing detail and color while throwing in some unique design touches into different components. Every component was represented in a consistent manner and he added in some extra programmatic bits as well.
You can check out Phil’s theme here. Congratulation’s Phil!
The idea for the Spot Prizes was to reward people because the judges found something interesting/inspiring/unusual about the entry. Judges decided to reward Spot Prizes to three entries:
Thanks again to everyone who entered and congratulations to the winners. Winners will be receiving an email concerning their prizes shortly. Thanks to the sponsors: Adobe and EffectiveUI.
I’m hoping to have all the themes available for everyone to download by next week. As a side note, if you’d like to host your own theme and have the link from ScaleNine go to your site, blog or whatever for downloading, just let me know or send me a link to where you’re hosting the theme.
The time to submit entries to the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge” has officially come to an end. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how many entries this contest would generate, but to my pleasant surprise we received over 30 entries! That means a ton of new themes for the Flex community and some awesome prizes for the winners.
Now on to the hard part, the judging. I have to go through and get everything prepped for the judges to go review the entries and pick the winners. It’s going to be a tough job. I’ve gone through a bunch of the entries already and the quality is awesome!
So, stay tuned for the announcement of the winners, which we’re shooting to have out next week. At that time you’ll also have access to all the entries to use in your own Flex applications, including the winning entries.
This is just a quick reminder post to let you know that the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge” ends in two weeks on October 10. If you want a chance to win some of the prizes you’ll need to get your entries in before that date. We’ve already started to see some good stuff being submitted and I have a feeling even more will be submitted as the deadline approaches.
I’m excited to announce that the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge” is officially under way! If you’ve ever entertained the idea of making a skin and submitting to ScaleNine, nows your chance to win some great prizes in the process. We’re looking for entries to award a first, second and third prize to people who create an awesome theme for Flex 3.
We were able to pull together some amazing prizes and judges with help from Adobe and EffectiveUI. Prizes for first place include:
With those prizes you can picture yourself at Adobe MAX sitting at the keynote with your MacBook Air coding away while people point and ask, “Hey, isn’t that the guy featured on the Adobe Dev Net? You know, the one who won that contest?” 
We’ve got some great prizes for second and third place, as well as “spot prizes” for people who put forth a strong effort.
You might be thinking, “I’m no designer” or “I’m no coder”, but why not team up with someone? You can find a designer or developer to collaborate with and divvy up the prizes. It’s a great excuse to get up to speed with skinning Flex components and thanks to Andrew Shorten, Adobe Platform Evangelist, you’ve got several tutorial videos to learn from.
Get all the information about the ScaleNine “Skin to Win Challenge”
Also, I’d like to thank Patrick Hansen, UX Designer from EffectiveUI, for making that sweet logo for the contest; Paulo Rizkalla, Developer for EffectiveUI, for helping me with some website stuff; and Mike Potter and Andrew Shorten of Adobe for their help putting this all together.
I’ve been wanting to redesign the ScaleNine site for a while now. As soon as I finished the book I immediately started to take advantage of my new found free time to work on a new design. After about a 1 1/2 months of getting in some hours of designing and coding here and there, the result is what you see now. Let’s do a before and after comparison:
ScaleNine (old)
ScaleNine (new)
There are drastic differences between the old and new designs and I’m pretty happy with the results. The new structure and organization of the site is going to allow me to do a lot more with content. The homepage specifically will allow some great flexibility for things I’m thinking about doing in the future.
I still have a bunch of content to add, including submissions to the gallery and showcase area. One thing I was sure to have in the new design was the names of the authors who created and submitted themes to the site. I constantly had to correct people who thought I made all the themes on ScaleNine.
So, there you go. A new look for ScaleNine.com. Stay tuned for some more updates in the coming months.
I’m happy to announce that I am joining EffectiveUI as a full-time employee and Experience Architect. I’ve been hanging out with a lot of the talent that EffectiveUI has pulled together, as well as working side-by-side with some of them to bring Degrafa to the masses. There’s a lot going on in the RIA space right now and it’ll be great to be in the mix with one of the companies at the fore-front of it all.
One of the most important aspects of putting together a successful application is the user experience, which is where my interest lies. I’m looking forward to being a part of a team that has put together some really awesome applications. Additionally, I will be making the move to the location of EffectiveUI’s main office in Denver, Colorado. Needless to say, February is going to be a crazy month for me, but I know 2008 is going to be a great year.
Whew, what a day! One of the projects I’m involved in, Degrafa, released the first beta today. I just now got some samples up to get you started. Right now only the SWC is available on Google Code, but we’ll be posting the source in the next couple days. We’ll also be updating the documentation and creating more samples.
If you’re not familiar with Degrafa, it’s a declarative graphics framework for Flex that allows you to use MXML markup to draw shapes, make complex graphics, create skins and also includes advanced CSS support. You can read more about the beta release here. Also, be sure to check out the documentation, samples and get in on some discussions.
Looks like the videos from the 360Flex Conference are starting to appear. There were some really great sessions and I’m bummed I didn’t get to see them all, but hey, that’s what the videos are for. Each one is $3.60 each to download for a single user license or there’s an option to get a 10-user license. You can check ‘em all out here as they get uploaded. The first part of the mega-session that Andy McIntosh and I did is up here. A big thanks to Tom Ortega, John Wilker and Bryan Zug for putting these together.
Jason Hawryluk, the creator of the Flex 2 Primitive Explorer, and I are in the process of creating a Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex. We’re calling it Degrafa and we just got the blog up where we’ll be discussing our progress, goals and looking for feedback. We will also be posting examples that will start basic, then gradually get into more complex bits of the Degrafa framework. We’re pretty excited about what we’re putting together and what the framework will be capable of.
The process involves exposing the Flash Graphics APIs up to the MXML level, but the Degrafa framework doesn’t stop at just the Flash APIs available. This may not seem like such a big deal, but it’s amazing thinking of the powerful possibilities this brings into the hands of both developers and designers. There are also, a lot of fundamental reasons why this is a great step toward easier visual design for Flex applications.
Some immediate benefits of bringing this up to the MXML stack are, but not limited to:
To learn more about Degrafa, check out the Degrafa site: http://www.degrafa.com