Simon Lord wrote:

10yrs ago I left the community for Flash, then a few years ago I
dropped Flash for CCS3/DHTML.  Now I'm playing with RunRev (was
MetaCard) again and having fun.  Lots of things have been improved,
the font support and html rendering are very impressive.

What's lacking however, is the ability to *easily* create GUI skins.
This was a huge problem in Flash as well until a technique known as
Scale9 was developed.

An entire site is dedicated to this when a UI designer realized its potential:

http://www.scalenine.com/

All you do is drop the GUI component of your choice into your Flash
app and *poof*, instant skin.  It's actually quite easy to do as well
using the tools in Flash but sites like this make the task of creating
the entire skin even easier.

I'd love to see RunRev get its own Scale9, or $$$ plugin.

Glad to see you back here, Simon. I remember you well from the SuperCard days, all the excellent tools you made. Great stuff.

With Rev's property inheritance for visual attributes (color, pattern, font, etc.), it's not hard to make a skinning system. I started work on a library and accompanying UI called SkinnerBox for that, with "themes" that encapsulate skin elements into separate hot-swappable files, a la Firefox. But alas my customers don't need customizable skins often enough to make finishing it a priority.

Chipp Walters put together a nifty tool for this called Interface Designer - I think you may find it quite interesting:

<http://www.altuit.com/webs/revCentral/InterfaceDesignerPurchase/Preview.htm>

If Chipp's tool doesn't do everything you need you may find it worth the time to roll your own. And you could sell it through RevSelect to recoup some of the cost. You certainly have the tools experience to make a good one, and I'll bet others would find it useful.

--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World
 Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
 Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
 revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription 
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution

Reply via email to