Scale9

[Richard Gaskin]

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