As part of our series on how we built Queued, today we’re going to talk about theming the Queued application, and touch on a few examples of what made putting the skin on Queued so much fun.
The foundation for the beautiful theme for Queued was laid down by colleagues Damon Dimmick and Torrey Rice, and their amazing wireframe and mockup work (respectively) provided the building blocks for laying down Queued’s skin.
From the perspective of a web designer with experience predominantly in HTML and CSS (the content and presentation layers), the behavior layer can seem a bit mystical. The behavior layer focuses on interactivity; unfortunately, it is a layer that can easily get lost, overlooked, or simply ignored in the collection of obligations that lay at the web designer’s feet—especially those who work for themselves, or who are within an organization as the sole “web person.” To all the multi-hatted, multi-tasked designers out there, this article is an introduction to Dojo, a JavaScript toolkit that makes adding oomph to the behavior layer (and so much more) really easy to do.
The design and styling elements that make up the Web 2.0 mantra have been defined by—among other things—rounded corners, transparency, and drop shadows. These three concepts have been key in many CSS-driven web applications or sites. (For examples of some great CSS-driven work, check out cssvault and cssBeauty.) Following the CSS2 recommendation, for years we’ve been using a combination of code and images to make these types of things possible.
My colleague, Torrey Rice, has touched upon unofficial CSS advancements in Safari 3.1 in his discussion about CSS animations, so I’ll focus on advancements that are part of ongoing CSS3 drafts. While CSS 3 as a whole is much maligned, we can use some of the properties that have already been implemented in today’s browsers with just a few simple lines of CSS. Dijit Themes for the Dojo Tooolkit already take advantage of these enhancements where it makes sense. Of course, you can also customize or write your own theme taking advantage of CSS3 wherever possible.
The programmers in the trenches of Web development can breathe a bit easier now that a major committee planning the future of the JavaScript standard has decided to focus on small, incremental changes that will improve the performance in Web browsers. Some members of the ECMA International standards committee still have bigger dreams to enhance the language, known more formally as ECMAScript, to tackle more complicated projects, but these plans receded as the group focused on clearer and more present needs.
Kris Zyp, a researcher at SitePen and the Dojo Foundation’s representative on the committee, said, “Our interest is empowering the Web developers, not seeing ECMAScript as a pure research language.”
Ajax, which was been a key goal for integration into the Zend Framework in the last release, also gets a boost. The Dojo Framework which is a popular Ajax library, will now be directly integrated into Zend Framework 1.6.
“What we’re really trying to go after here is to build the best framework for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and the Dojo integration is a huge part of that,” Sinclair said.
Dojo co-founder Dylan Schiemann, who is also CEO of Dojo Foundation member SitePen, is also optimistic about the integration of Dojo into PHP.
“It makes it easier for PHP and Zend Framework users to build better web applications using Dojo,” Schiemann told InternetNews.com. “We strive to make Dojo work with as many different servers and development environments as possible, and integration with Zend is a huge move forward towards that goal.”
These are truly exciting times. Not only for SitePen, but for the web application space in general. It seems we are seeing a seismic shift in the way we use computer applications: moving away from the clunky, static, boxed-installed lot to those that are quick, lightweight, flexible, and web-based. More and more we are building and using applications that are not tied down to one single computer. Web applications have allowed us a truly mobile lifestyle, giving and providing us access to all of our crucial – and not so crucial – information on multiple computers and devices at the touch of a fingertip.
So how do we go about building these applications? How do we take these web-based ideas and concepts and turn them into something people can use and enjoy? When building web applications, it is crucial to not only have the back-end functionality and nuts and bolts in place. You need the smooth curves, the chrome, and a consistent, uniform design to tie everything together. The design of an application’s user interface can be a make or break experience, one that determines if you and your organization have the next true “killer app”, or one that will languish in obscurity.
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