The previous installment of the Dive Into Dojo series shows how easy it is to Dive Into Dojo Charting to get started with Dojo’s charting library. It comes with dozens of stylish themes you can effortlessly plug into any chart. But what if you want your charts to match your website’s design or business’ branding? No worries: Dojo’s charting library allows you to create custom themes!
One huge feature that sets the Dojo Toolkit apart from other JavaScript libraries is its UI component system: Dijit. A flexible, comprehensive collection of Dojo classes (complemented by corresponding assets like images, CSS files, etc.), Dijit allows you to create flexible, extensible, stylish widgets. To learn how to install, configure, and use basic Dijits within your web application, keep reading!
Interacting with a web application is a conversation. The user interface is your company’s proxy, it communicates on your behalf and just like a real conversation, you communicate as much with your body language as with the words you exchange. Good visual design can provide the right setting for this conversation, but interaction is the body language in this analogy. And one of the defining characteristics of good interaction is responsiveness.
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.
As with every SitePen project, we started out Queued with a set of written requirements that defined what the app should do. From that set of requirements, the design team began to define common user goals and create wireframes that detailed how the user would achieve these goals.
We created a set of wireframes for every screen in the app and then the visual fun began. What should it look like?
Sometimes building an application from scratch is easier than building on an already existing interaction model. For Queued, our goal was to take the Netflix user experience and port it to a lightweight desktop application, while adding some modest enhancements.
Creating an alternate interface for an already well-known web site carries some unique responsibilities. First, unless there is something seriously wrong with the original site, straying too far from the established model can be counterproductive. Second, innovating on existing features becomes more important than replacing them. And third, adding new interface functionality without obstructing existing interactions remains a crucial consideration.
For the Queued project, SitePen faced the additional challenge of showing off features of Adobe AIR that might not necessarily lead to the most fluid interaction, but which were powerful enough to merit inclusion as a demonstration of AIR’s powerful capabilities. We’ll discuss a few of our interaction changes here, though these aren’t the only modifications that we decided to implement.
Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.
At SitePen, we help our clients build great web applications. Most are not available for public consumption as they live behind company firewalls and/or require licensing. On the other hand, Queued is free and open-source software, BSD-licensed, and hosted on Google Code.
Dijit has a tremendous wealth of high quality and feature-rich form elements providing key functionality including validation, time calculation, spinner controls, calendars, and much more. Furthermore, Dijit gives you a set of themes to choose from: Tundra, Soria, Noir, and Nihilo.
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 new Dojo Search is now live. I worked on creating this with the goal of showing how much information there is out there about the Dojo Toolkit and supplying a way to aggregate that information in a central location. Now you can search all of Dojo’s Resources instead of dojotoolkit.org alone. Most of the time if you have a question, it’s already been asked and answered!
The Dojo community is large and there is a lot of great information spread out across the vastness of the web. The Dojo Toolkit has been around for a while and has undergone numerous additions and improvements since its inception. Unfortunately, some of the documentation and valuable data needed by users and enthusiasts is decentralized. Dojo Search is designed to help alleviate this problem.
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