Skinning Effort

[yavery]

Hi,

Can anyone (Isomorphic included) who had previous experience producing a custom skin (derived from an existing one)
for the Smartclient framework share the time estimate we can anticipate, assuming the person doing the work
is knowledgeable with CSS technologies and general web design?

Kind regards,

[Isomorphic]

What we can advise is that it's important to get a designer who has some technical knowledge of skinning techniques in Ajax libraries. We've seen designers that were able to produce complete skins from the documentation with no additional help, in perhaps 1.5 to 2 weeks, and other designers that had to have the exact filenames and media pieces specified exacting detail.

[yavery]

Thanks for your input.

Kind regards,

[levi]

Does Isomorphic provide release notes of changes in the base skins?
The Quick Start document advices to create a copy of a base skin to start with a custom skin, but what with changes to that base skin after this point?

For instance, a new entry added by SmartGWT in the Context menu of a ListGridField. If this has a standard skin icon set, this icon won't be available in the custom skin. 'Until a human notices it', this will stay a problem.

[Isomorphic]

No, there aren't release notes for skins.

We don't follow the issue you're having. If you're keeping you media separate and adding it to the base skin, how can your custom icon disappear?

[levi]

Not talking about my icon, but your icon.

If you add a new option in a menu (or a total new widget), then our custom skin won't have that CSS, images directories, icons, ...

[Isomorphic]

If your custom skin is maintained as a set of changes that can be easily re-applied to the base skin as recommended in the QuickStart, then this problem is easily solved - this just means you'll want to do this before your final test runs.

[subashk]

Do you recommend any design firm that can provide us Smartclient custom skins?

[Isomorphic]

There's two parts to this: doing the actual visual design (use any firm whose work you like) vs creating a SmartClient skin from that visual design. For the latter task, Isomorphic itself is a good firm to use, although anyone who has skinned a rich web site before can do it using the Skinning Guide.