“… That’s right- less painful for users. Products like IBM WebSphere Portal and SAP Netweaver Portal were supposed to bring much improved user interaction models to enterprise IT, but unfortunately traditional systems-focused IT departments, rather than user interaction specialists and their web brethren, did the work …”
James eludes to the crux of the problem in the above quote and Thomas Otter highlights it further in a comment saying …
I sense that most of the problems/challenges with enterprise UI are not just a tool challenge. It is a design thinking problem. Until design thinking permeates enterprise application development, UI will be a sore point.
Thomas is right, it is a design thinking problem, more precisely, the problem is that there are no design thinkers in most teams that build or customize enterprise software…. read more
Here are two quick layouts we wrote during the meeting as I showed everyone how easy it is to write a custom layout …
Random Layout
Step Layout
These layouts are currently somewhat crude but the idea was to convey how easy it is to write your own layouts … here the code for RandomLayout … just one simple function … read more
Layouts in Flex 4 are decoupled from containers and its quite simple to define your own layout. Yesterday I wrote ConcentricLayout.
ConcentricLayout arranges layout elements in such a way that their centers are aligned and their size sequentially decreases. The width of each layout element is less than the previous element by a value specified using the horizontalGap property and the height of each layout element is less than the previous element by a value specified using the verticalGap property. If the element has an explicit width or an explicit height it still aligns its center but is not resized. You can tell the layout to force a resize of all elements and ignore their explicitly specified size using the forceResize flag
Last week I got some Illustrator files from the designer on our team, which I had to convert into Flex 4 skins. When we had planned this, we thought this would be easy … the designer makes the skins in Illustrator, we export FXG directly from Illustrator or we import them into Catalyst, do some tweaking and then export to get FXG that we can use in SparkSkins .. unfortunately it wasn’t that simple, I’m documenting some of the gotchas and workarounds I learned for anyone else who may run into the same situation.
Most of the problems we had were related to gradients, here are some snapshots …
The first strip is original graphic created in Illustrator
The second strip FXG Exported from Illustrator
The third strip is original Illustrator file imported into Catalyst and then FXG exported from Catalyst
Flex 4 does not have an EllipticalArc primitive yet, but I needed one today .. thankfully Degrafa already has an EllipticalArc Class, I translated that to work with Flex 4.
EllipticalArc is a FilledElement so it can have a Fill and a Stroke just like other FilledElements Rect, Ellipse etc.
I haven’t yet implemented some of the layout related functionality that other primitives like Rect, Ellipse etc implement … but it seems to work fine with basic layouts, which is what I needed for now. The class is hosted on Google code under the Apache 2.0 License, just in case someone wants to improve it.
Thank you to the Degrafa team for sharing their amazing work that saves me loads of time every now and then.
