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.

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.

First Place – Undefined by Alberto Alcaraz

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!

Second Place – Brownie by Nahuel Foronda

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!

Third Place – iCandy by Phil Chung

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!

Spot Prizes

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:

Spot Prize – Aeon Graphical by Xu Jiajun

Spot Prize – Rock On by Bhavin Padhiyar

Spot Prize – Disco Type by Heather Ford

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.

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.

We were able to pull together some amazing prizes and judges with help from Adobe and EffectiveUI. Prizes for first place include:

• (1) MacBook Air with SSD
• (1) Ticket to MAX North America or Europe
• (1) Copy of Adobe CS3 Master Suite
• (1) Copy of Flex Builder Professional
• And a Feature on the Adobe Developer Network

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.

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.

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.

Jason Hawryluk

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:

• Reuse of graphical assets.
• Visual tooling preperation.
• Less code to write in order to achieve great visual graphics without using another tool, all directly in Flex.
• Readability when compared to ActionScript.
• Dynamic runtime changes to all aspects. Something not available in a SWF or PNG imported asset.
• Complexities of learning ActionScript to reap the benefits of the graphics api’s are far less, allowing visual designers to make use of the available power of the Flash runtime immediately within Flex.

To learn more about Degrafa, check out the Degrafa site: http://www.degrafa.com