Hi all, in this thread I want to join a plan to work on a theme feature for Apache Royale. Hope you all could comment here if this starting point is in the good track or if you think we need things not expressed here.
1.- Theme feature will be a pluggable set of styles (colors, drawings, images, animations,...) to customize the visuals of Apache Royale controls and components. 2.- The affected list of controls and components must to be defined in a vote thread. We'll be opening a vote thread to designate that concrete list based on concrete set of components. For example: Express Set : Button, TextInput, CheckBox,.... and so on. While some of the components will be clearly included at first sight (Button, TextInput,...) sets in different frameworks are very different and for this reason we must to concrete our own set or at least what we start offering (although that will be evolving over time with more component inclusions) (in this point is important that if you could propose a concrete list of components, that would be of great help, of course that list must be implemented in the set you think would have the theme feature. I assume that will be Express. If not, should we create a new set?) 3.- MDL, CreateJS are sets that has it's own visuals, implementations and will be excluded of this plan. In fact, the problem with all that sets is that once the user start developing in one of them, they are tied the concrete implementation, set of controls, events, properties and change the final app visuals are impossible without rewriting the entire application. 4.- The themes will be a separate library project that will create a SWC 5.- SWC themes must be easily swappable. We must defined a way to swap themes. In Flex we add src theme and have a "theme" property. In Royale it could be a Bead for the main application component. The best solution on this should be provided by people here more near to the apache royale arquitecture 3.- We'll be creating at least one theme that will be highly configurable 4.- We'll be using 2-3 color scheme (primary, secondary, contrast) for all components in a theme 5.- We'll use solid colors (we could try as well to integrate gradients, but this would depend on how visuals result looks) 6.- We'll try to include some more configuration per component. For example: round corners on buttons, boxed text inputs vs underlined ones... There's much more that can be done here, but I think we must reach a point and from there examine our experience and see where to gro from there. I'm sure will be learning a lot in the progress and right now we don't know how to do more advanced things, or most things could take much more time if we try to do all at the same time. For example, some things that will be off in the first stage would be skins. Thanks -- Carlos Rovira http://about.me/carlosrovira
