Comments on: Web app theme showdown: Aristo and Ace

By: Allen

Allen — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:13:34 +0000

Ross: Anybody who’s spent time manually maintaining sprites will understand how great that feature is. It’s the kind of feature that shows why all web apps need build tools, even the ones written in JavaScript.

By: Ross Boucher

Ross Boucher — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:07:59 +0000

Cappuccino's latest version actually comes with support for a new and better image spriting technique. Rather than require manually building sprite files, hand editing CSS, or manually annotating images with restrictions, it uses Data URL and/or MHTML support found in every major browser. Just by running the standard build tools, all of the resources in your app will be sprited, and the correct sprited resource is determined at runtime using browser feature detection.

By: Allen

Allen — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:08:37 +0000

Charles (who is the creator of SproutCore FYI): That makes a lot of sense, and would probably serve as a good example on how to create a SproutCore theme.

Paul (who is the creator of JQuery UI FYI): ThemeRoller is slick, especially for how it can be used on its own outside of JQuery.

Steve: Fixed, sorry about that.

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:53:51 +0000

Allen, you need to tweak your theme to better control text overflow. :)

By: Steven Fisher

Steven Fisher — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:53:24 +0000

But will they work with IE6?!?

By: The Ashes » Blog Archive » Aristo and Ace; Good looking and open?

The Ashes » Blog Archive » Aristo and Ace; Good looking and open? — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:24:30 +0000

[...] Pike has posted a comparison of Aristo with the new Ace look and feel that SproutCore recently added. It is great to see great [...]

By: Jouni

Jouni — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:01:23 +0000

Allen (and Cappuccino team for that matter), I’m using SmartSprites (http://csssprites.org/) to maintain a very complex set of theme images in my attempt to make web toolkits look nicer (http://vaadin.com).

SmartSprites is a Java command line sprite generator, which works quite well for my needs. It doesn’t pack the sprites in the smallest possible organization, but at least I can have my images easily (and automatically) bundled together.

With SmartSprites, enabling sprites isn’t any harder than regular CSS theming. Highly recommended.

By: Allen

Allen — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:14:36 +0000

Sprited images do make a huge impact, although they are a pain to make and maintain. I’d say Cappuccino needs to implement them to consider themselves 1.0.

By: Paul Bakaus

Paul Bakaus — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:02:29 +0000

Also take a look at http://themeroller.com, our very own approach at theming. It will not only generate a heavily customized theme based on your needs, but it goes way beyond ‘just’ styling jQuery UI widgets. People are bundling whole applications with the CSS Framework, as well as styling the form controls.

By: mx

mx — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:47:16 +0000

I’m not sure unstyled forms work in all contexts, as not even rich desktop applications use the same styles of controls uniformly: the choice is based on what works well and looks reasonable in a given application. Limiting the choice to stock forms and form controls would disallow improvements and styles that make the experience better.