Hi Tim

I'm at the stage where I need to start styling my app and have been
playing around deriving new styles from the existing ones. I'm also
about to start learning some CSS to understand the whole architecture a
bit better, but before I start some pointers would be useful...

1. I noticed in Mark Brook's nice UI that his scrollbars are not the
default - is this something that would be done from CSS?

2. What tool do you use to create new styles - Photoshop?

3. Looking around the web I see other frameworks that appear to be
styled solely using CSS - am I mistaken? Is the image-based approach
used by EWB for a particular reason?

Thanks, Bob

Bob,

<< I'm at the stage where I need to start styling my app and have been
playing around deriving new styles from the existing ones. I'm also about to
start learning some CSS to understand the whole architecture a bit better,
but before I start some pointers would be useful...

1. I noticed in Mark Brook's nice UI that his scrollbars are not the
default - is this something that would be done from CSS? >>

Probably not.  You need to create a custom control for doing this.  However,
with the 3rd party control changes in the EWB IDE, the native Windows scroll
bars will be going away anyways in favor of custom scroll bars, and the EWB
themes will reflect the ability to style them accordingly.

<< 2. What tool do you use to create new styles - Photoshop? >>

I use Paint Shop Pro, primarily because I'm a graphics idiot that needs
something simple.

<< 3. Looking around the web I see other frameworks that appear to be styled
solely using CSS - am I mistaken? Is the image-based approach used by EWB
for a particular reason? >>

Yes, it's used because IE8 doesn't support certain types of styles and that
was the chosen baseline for browser support.  However, I'm totally
re-working the theme support for EWB to make it much more flexible, and it
will include the ability to choose native styling or image-based styling on
a per-part basis.

If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

<<1. I noticed in Mark Brook's nice UI that his scrollbars are not the
default - is this something that would be done from CSS?>>

Thanks for noticing. However, I think this is just because the screenshot is from a Mac and those are the native scrollbars. Cheers!


<<2. What tool do you use to create new styles - Photoshop?>>

If you're using a Mac then Pixen is fantastic for editing EWB theme components.

Tim, when you are working on the themes, I'd really like the buttons to be able to
take an image too. TBitButton style I think it is like.

(Just in passing as I'm considering a new project!)

/Matthew Jones/

Matthew,

<< Tim, when you are working on the themes, I'd really like the buttons to
be able to take an image too. TBitButton style I think it is like.  >>

Yep, that's going to be part of the "icon library" portion of the theme
re-write.  Any theme will be able to contain any number of icons/images, and
they will be included in the style sheet for faster load times.  I
considered doing them as normal images in the TButton control, but the
display lag/load time is crappy-looking and there could literally be dozens
of icon states/images that are necessary.

Thanks,

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Sounds like a good solution, particularly for things like buttons.

/Matthew Jones/