March 2011
9 posts
This is the part of me that I have learned to dislike, the part of me that enjoys to re-think stuff over and over again.
Every time I feel bored or uninspired I remember a great quote by one of my favorite programmers / authors I know, it goes exactly like this:
when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
_why (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff) on Twitter about 2 years ago.
I believe that’s accurate.
And drives me to stop watching TV and geek around, to code in Haskell and technologies that are not that useful but make me feel I’m doing something different, I am, in fact, creating.
For those that arn’t familiar with jQuery UI, it’s essentially a collection of jQuery plugins that try to do for user interaction what jQuery did for JavaScript. Like it’s parent library, jQuery UI does its very best to remain cross browser compliant. It is easy to implement. It is very easy to theme. Unfortunately it hasn’t seen quite the same uptake as jQuery, and I set out on this task to improve the biggest hurdle I experienced: its design.
Frankly, jQuery UI themes are goofy. The rounded corners are goofy. The colour schemes are goofy. At this point you probably think I’m being a bit unreasonable, but compare jQuery UI to what the competition is up to:
Ace and Aristo are the respective open source themes of SproutCore and Cappuccino, applied to their parent JavaScript libraries. You can see a great comparison of the two in this article by Allen Pike. Both UI libraries duplicate the functionality of jQuery UI slightly, but look simply amazing doing so. I had already started mocking and building my own jQuery UI theme when I re-discovered the Aristo PSD. I decided to abandon my work and port the “Aristo” theme for Cappuccino over to jQuery UI.
So here we have Aristo for jQuery UI. A proof-of-concept to illustrate how jQuery UI could progress if they get sacrifice some of their direction and get some nifty designers on board. Imagine the possibilities if jQuery UI got Cocoia or Sofa on board!
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 with permission from 280 North and Pinvoke.
Ever wanted to add an obtrusive Dickbar to your iOS apps?
Wait no more, for Ching-Lan HUANG 黃青嵐 AKA @digdog has packaged up this UI tragedy for you to use in less than ten lines of Objective-C:
UIDickBar *dickBar = [[UIDickBar alloc] initWithDickTitle:@"#DickBar" dickBadge:@"Stupid" actionBlock:^{ // Anything you want to do after UIDickBar tapped [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://digdog.tumblr.com"]]; }]; [dickBar showInView:self.view]; [dickBar release];
