Here is another weekly update from the qooxdoo forge.

New Theme: Indigo

As announced recently we’re starting to roll out a new look. The new theme will permeate through all our endeavors. In the area of our online presence the Bugzilla bug tracker and our manual are  first to publish  it. Others, like our blog and home page, will follow suit.

In the realm of application development it manifests itself as a new qooxdoo theme named Indigo. All our standard apps showcase it from now on, and it is available within the Widgetbrowser and Demobrowser through their theme drop-down. But it is also part of the theme system of the framework and will be shipped with the next qooxdoo version. So everybody will have the chance to use it in their own apps.

Consider everything beta. Have a look at it and let us know what you think.

UI Design Improvements on qooxdoo Mobile

We have been optimizing the look & feel of qooxdoo mobile. Especially the iOS and Android themes will have an improved look which is more oriented towards the native look of their platforms.

Here are some examples of our improvements:

• Own implementation of SelectBox. Instead of using the native select box, we implemented our own selection logic. When you click on a SelectBox, it opens a dialog where you choose the target value. Result: SelectBox and choosing dialog look the same in desktop and mobile browsers, and they are fully customizable by CSS3.
  
• We re-styled buttons/widgets for the iOS and Android themes. Instead of using images we realized the BackButton, ToggleSwitchButton and TabView by using only CSS3 features.
  

  

Better Error Tooltips

The styling of the error tool tips for the Modern theme always had a little arrow to point to the widget the error occurred in. Now, when the tooltip is positioned on the opposite side e.g. due to space restrictions, the arrow changes to point also to the opposite direction.

Bugfixes

For a complete list of tasks accomplished during the last working week, use this bugzilla query.

Tool Chain: Pretty Printing

In the course of introducing the new parser into the tool chain, there is now also support for simple, straight forward pretty printing of individual JavaScript files. The command tool/bin/compile.py -q --pretty <file>.js will do this for you (printing the result to STDOUT). There are no fancy options to tweak, but it is  helpful if you have code that is garbled or has been ripped off its white space formatting.

German JavaScript Magazine mag.js

This is interesting for German-speaking users: Today the new JavaScript magazine mag.js has been released. Andreas and Martin put some time in an article about qooxdoo which has landed in the first issue. It features some relevant insights into what we plan and want to achieve. Check out the online magazine, it’s for free and also contains other interesting articles about JavaScript.

So far. Enjoy your weekend.