Design

...when running your app on a small, high screen-density device.

As you may know, we are developing a GTD application that runs on the Blackberry Playbook and Android tablets (others to come) called Conqu. When we started, back in November, we were making designs as normal with Photoshop at the right size, and what we liked the most when looking at the designs (even when made small to fit the size of the device) were usually not all that good on the device. Since we hadn't developed the app yet, we only had mockup images to see. So what we did was browse those images to see how the actual app would look like.

This is what we learned.

We are happy to announce that Nahuel's entry made it second place in ScaleNine's Skin to Win Contest! Congratulations to all the winners.

The coolest new tool showcased by Adobe at Chicago MAX had to be Thermo.  From everyone I spoke to at MAX who saw it, the consensus is clear -- Thermo is HOT!  This is a design tool that lets designers instantly create a working rich internet application from their artwork and wireframes!  With a simple click of the mouse, the Flex source code is instantly generated from their artwork.  For example, you can import content from Adobe Photoshop and Thermo will instantly generate the mxml for it.  To really appreciate what a powerful took this will be for designers, take a look at the sneak preview I shot.

There are a some new features available for skinning in Flex 3 beta 2. Some of them are covered by Juan and NJ. But I want to focus in one specific topic: Stateful Skins (without Flash).

I'd like to announce the release of our latest project, Fill Colors!  As many of you know, Nahuel and Laura have been passionate users and fans of Adobe Flex from its beginning.  With Fill Colors, we really want to explore and push the possibilities of what is possible with Flex. Having grown tired of the default Flex style, we wanted to manipulate the look and feel of a Flex application.  We were inspired by CSS Zen Garden, and used the same idea in our application:  the application cannot be modified and any changes can only be applied to the style sheet.  In this way, we can show the power of applying visual changes from the style sheet alone. Whether you’re an expert or a newcomer to Adobe Flex, we hope you will explore Fill Colors and that it will stimulate your interest and challenge your skills with the fun possibilities of skinning a Flex application.  

We hope to see lots of participation and people contributing Flex skins so we can showcase them for all to learn from.  We have some sample skins and you can see other Flex skin examples at www.scalenine.com.

Most of all, we want you to have fun with Fill Colors! We have a contest for people to submit their best Flex skins and it runs until September 28, 2007, so show us what you can do!  A big thanks to Ted Patrick for generously providing the contest prize!

We submitted two entries for the Flex Developer Derby, which, for some reason, are not yet posted at Adobe Labs.

Home Locator is a complete revamp of our Real Estate sample application. We changed the functionality and included a Yahoo! Map that shows the property location. We actually didn't use much of the old code and we focused much more on the usability and look and feel of the application. We spent an incredible amount of time during the design, not even doing actual code. Most of the hurdles we encountered were due to Yahoo! maps not wanting to behave and bugs in the Flex framework, specially when we wanted to skin the application, going away from the default halo (or whatever is called now) look. At the end, we are happy with the outcome. Before you ask, no, we are not planning to give the source away, at least not for now. We are, however, going to post the source for the original Real Estate application for the Beta 3 release.

We have no hopes of winning anything with the other application, My to-do list, since it does not compare to the other entries. It is really a very simple application, and it was developed as part of an article for the ColdFusion Developer Journal. So you can expect to see a step-by-step tutorial based on it and the complete source for download soon.

As many of you have noticed, we have changed the design. We did it for the CSSReboot on May first.
We spend a lot of time making it more usable and at the same time making it look nicer. I think it’s much better than what we previously had.