Recently i switched my GuI and programming to fit Javafx and use the new JavaFx scene builder! These new tools (atleast new for me) has opened alot of doors when it comes to creating user interfaces and i want to learn more and get better at it. Therefore i wish to learn CSS for JavaFx.
So far i have been unable to find any online tutorials for beginners and because of this I want to ask you guys; do you know any sites, books or video tutorials where i can learn to write CSS for JavaFx projects?
For learnIng JavaFX CSS, work through the following tutorials:
The JavaFX Getting Started tutorial on CSS.
The JavaFX CSS tutorial.
When using SceneBuilder, review:
Using a Style Sheet in SceneBuilder.
SceneBuilder Style Sheet Support.
When developing your own apps, the two most useful resources are:
The JavaFX CSS Reference Guide.
The (essential) JavaFX 2.2 Caspian Style Sheet which contains the default styling for all JavaFX controls.
If you search the web you will find many resources on CSS and HTML. Be careful using these resources. JavaFX CSS is not the same as the CSS you use to style a web page. While the file format is the same, JavaFX CSS has it's own set of attributes and allowed values, includes few layout processing specifiers, uses it's own syntax for effect processing, background and border specifications, etc.
You might easily find many good resources simply by Googling.
Here are recommended ones
MDN
www.w3.org
Note:Stay away from w3schools.com.
Reason to avoid w3schools
The best way to learn CSS would be to learn it by doing.
Create some web pages and style them no your own.
I am designing the user interface of a web application but I am inexperienced with UI Design, I just drag and drop labels and textboxes, but they look not symetric and properly arranged on the page. In a windows application, user interface design is easier since the visual stuido helps you with location of controls, but I don't know how to do that in a web application. Is the only solution entering the html and using lots of space characters for the page to look well organised ? This just makes me feel like an amateur.
Web apps are styled using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS is used for every aspect of UI in web apps. This is not limited to just ASP.NET, but to web development in general.
ASP.NET, and Visual Studio (or other IDEs) may allow you a familiar drag-and-drop interface for creating the UI, but under the hood, ASP.NET and these tools simply generate css for styling.
For example, in Visual Studio 2010, you can select "Change positioning to absolute for controls added using Tooldbox, paste, or drag and drop." in the HTML Designer Options
You can use these tool to drag and drop elements if you like, but I strongly recommend against even starting down that road for several reasons:
Unless you understand css, you will struggle with otherwise simple positioning and styling issues. The drag/drop tools and properties exposed are often not sufficient.
Web design is vastly different thatn WinForms design. You need to deal with many more screen resolutions, and browser resizes, which need to be fluid. Absolute positioning is horrible for this.
Once you learn the wrong way, it's very hard to change your ways. It's better to learn the "right way" up front.
There's a relatively simple CSS tutorial here.
I'm sorry there isn't a quick and easy answer,but if you're going to do web development at all, you need to learn to use css properly, and there's quite a bit to learn. Hopefully this tutorial will be a gentle introduction.
If you don't like that one, try this Bing search.
I would ask if anyone has had experience in integrating a grid based CSS system (960 or similar) with a GWT uibinder application.
Our application is done with GWT 2.1, UIBinder and the latest GWT CSS capabilities, which have been really great to work with and enabled us to have a modular and flexible styling system. Our design team has returned a HTML layout with the corresponding grid css files and we are supposed to integrate them with our GWT code.
If we were to integrate the grid styles into our uibinder xml files we would have to wrap all our GWT widgets with divs with the right grid class names.
Personally I don't like the idea of mixing a completely separate grid css concern with the modular uibinder system, but I do understand the benefits the grid system can provide.
Any opinions or experiences? Pros and Cons for either approach?
We found ourselves in a similar position, having the app built around gwt, MVP and uibinder. This is great for developers, but it turned out to not be so great for designers. At the begining we gave them a html snapshot of our app + css and asked them to design it. They did't like this. It became a nightmare when customers wanted custom designs done by their designers.
The question is will simply wrapping you widgets in div be enough? Our designer provided custom buttons, tables, links, etc.. It was quite a task to force gwt widgets to look like the design.
So what we did was:
Replaced gwt-centric app design with html-centric one. This means we avoid generating html in code. We use classic html+JS+jQuery apporach, just instead of JS we have gwt and instead jQuery we use gwtQuery. We use only a few gwt widgets. Instead, in out Views we use gwtQuery to copy&expand example html that designer provided. GwtQuery can be externalized: all selectors can be put in one (or many) external interfaces, if a design changes (customers want changes or even bring in their designs) this intersection of html and gwt is all in one place.
Ditched gwt 2.2 mvp (activities, places), for our own which is a simplified version of gwt 2.1 mvp architecture. We no longer have to add 2 new classes and update others (place, tokenizer, update place factory) to have a new place.
I have to present a prototype of an web app in the following days to one of my clients, the thing is I'm not so good at CSS and worst of all I'm almost never happy with the results I get.
Coding the business logic poses no challenge to me, the UI design however takes more than 80% of my time. I don't need nothing breathtaking, just a clean, nice and presentable environment, an example:
This is a recurring problem I've been having, I wish web UI development could have a less naked default style, an approach similar to Visual Studio or iPhone SDK would be very useful to me.
The above mockup created with Balsamiq Mockups is a great example, all the most common "components" are available to use, and best of all: there is only one good-looking style to choose from.
Is there something like this for the web? A neutral yet nice CSS or Javascript UI framework?
Options so far:
Bootstrap
Qooxdoo
jQuery UI
jQuery Tools
MochaUI
Ext JS
Yahoo! User Interface Library
BlueTrip
BluePrint
Uki (Demo)
Napkee
YAML
Baseline
iPlotz
Sproutcore
ForeUI
I'm interested in knowing if there are any CSS-only UI frameworks.
I found this page with a very nice list of Web UI Libraries, but most of them (at least the good ones) seem to be specific to Java, are there any equally good alternatives in pure CSS or JS?
PS: I'm not interested in AJAX, effects, behaviors and so on... my main (only) concern is style.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!
After a very careful consideration of all the UI libraries suggested, I've come to the conclusion that ExtJS and Qooxdoo are the ones that most closely fit my needs. jQuery UI seems promising but only offers a reduced amount of elements.
As far as CSS-only libraries go I've found BlueTrip / BluePrint and the themes suggested by tambler to be the best. Aside from that, Flex and Napkee also seem to be worth exploring.
Time to learn ExtJS now! =)
A combination of 960gs for layout and jQuery-UI for styling is probably what you are after.
You could also consider the blueprint CSS framework instead of 960gs.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned:
http://www.extjs.com/
Its a commercial js frameworks, but pretty affordable, and makes putting together a nice UI a breeze. There's a much more complete set of elements then jqueryui, and its designed to make an entire app. I've only played with it a little, but I really love it so far. Free for personal use.
If you really want to get a feel for a complete UI developed with EXT, try this url:
http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/extjs-build/examples/feed-viewer/feed-viewer.html
What about using dojo and dijit?
Dijit is a fast way to create widgets and elements. It also comes with 3 default themes which are easy to modify.
A good list of different widgets here
Pair up with someone who specializes in UI design.
If you are better at dealing with business logic, your time is better off spent exclusively coding business logic so you can master it. This will require you to learn how to interface with someone else who excels at presentation. (xml and json are common means)
Business logic and presentation are very different. Designing a system that not only looks good, but is intuitive and easy to use is quite difficult. Equally as difficult and time-consuming as establishing the inner workings of a complex application.
A good interface is not as simple as including a css framework.
I consider myself to be a more 'creative' programmer who does excel in presentation. I happened to be lucky enough to cross path's with someone who was, first of all... very motivated, and second of all very good at 'business logic'. He had a lot more experience planning and implementing complex systems, while I mainly have been focusing on interface design.
If you are more productive doing system architecture, planning, developing, whatever... you should push yourself in that direction. While solo development projects can be rather fulfilling, I view it as inefficient. It is very rare that someone possess skills to develop top-level applications solo.
The challenge is finding someone who you work well with.
Check out Google Web Toolkit. It has a pretty clean default look. They have examples . In particular, their Showcase example demonstrates all of the available widgets and the css styling used to achieve the look.
There are a few frameworks aimed at (G)UI Design; Qooxdoo, JQuery UI and MochaUI being a few of them (although the last is more a proof-of-concept than a usable framework). These frameworks usually offer a variety of JS-powered elements (form elements, such as input fields and submit buttons, but other elements like tabs as well). However, it will still be up to you to position these elements, and perhaps style them, to your liking.
Perhaps familiarizing yourself with a CSS framework (such as 960GS) might complement the above JS UI Frameworks.
(As a personal disclaimer; I have very little experience with any of the frameworks mentioned above. But I'm sure either Google or SO can provide answers I can't.)
This won't help you out for your current project, but it's worth considering for future projects. After spending many years creating GUI applications in HTML 4 and constantly wrestling against the limitations of CSS and HTML, I thought I'd try out Adobe Flex. What an improvement!
Rather than faking a tabbed page control or data grid, with Flex or Silverlight, your markup can simply specify a tabbed page control or data grid. And the frameworks come with default styles that are boring but not at all bad. I'm not saying these completely replace HTML, but if you need widgets and GUI layout, I believe they're a much better alternative.
You might consider browsing the following site:
http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-skins
There are several "Administrative" themes available for purchase here that may suit your needs.
wireframe mockups like that are a brilliant way to start.
Having used most of the UI framewroks discussed here, I'd liek to steer you towards jQueryUi for the following reasons:
jQueryUI CSS framework takes care of the consistent and cool looking CSS for you (it's really easy - just make some markup and apply the classes)
jQueryUI has tabcontrol, and heaps on neat quick easy ways to style forms.
If you are targeting modern, non IE, browsers, then you should check out Sproutcore. For mockups I use mockingbird.
A relatively new PHP framework specifically designed for development of UI-focused software. Elements you have here including Tabs, Filters and Grids are included and will take you about 20 lines of code to implement.
http://agiletoolkit.org/
Have you tried Axure? It's a tool for rapidly creating wireframes, prototypes and specifications for applications and web sites.
It works in a similar way to Balsamiq, but it allows you to export your wireframes/prototype as HTML, CSS and Javascript.
You can then upload this to a server or run it on your computer as a working example.
You can create forms, links, tabs, rollovers, Javascript effects.
If you are already using Balsamic Mockups for your prototypes then you should consider Napkee. To quote the website "Napkee lets you to export Balsamiq Mockups to HTML/CSS/JS and Adobe Flex 3 at a click of a button."
I ran into this awhile ago, and couldn't find anything, so I took it as an opportunity to learn css. But since then it seems great strides have been made towards this subject.
Summarizing your problem, there is a wikipedia page.
There is yaml-css, which takes yaml and turns it into css
There is baseline, but it assumes some css knowledge.
I'd also suggest looking at Adobe's Dreamweaver. They have a lot of css and style generation tools which produce very readable and w3c compatible code.
I hope that helps.
A combination of 960gs for layout and jQuery-UI or Jquery tools is great
i use them almost in every project but i'd like to add to http://easyframework.com/
although its not a business friendly so
make sure to check out its license
but i like it
I recently discovered a nice website called iplotz.com where you can create a mockup of your application/website/project online without installing anything.
It also has most of the common controls, along with much more features for managing thw whole project and sharing it with others online.
I must admit, i didn't try it yet myself, but i looked at it a bit and it seems pretty cool. I'll probably be using it soon enough.
Sass looks like it has potential as a way to mitigate some css headaches.
I like to add Bootstrap it's intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.
I like RocketCSS. Nice clean design, give it a go.
I am a c# developer.
Recently I had to design a web UI in asp .net 2.0 .I had strange problems with aligning controls in Visual studio UI.
I have used Div, table tags to align asp .net controls(labels, textbox, grid etc).
But the problem was what I saw in design surface of visual studio was entirely different (most of the time) when I view the page in browser.
The gap between controls and alignments was never perfect .I have seen other developers also doing trial and error methods without a proper guidelines.
C# coding I am pretty good and I have lots of Microsoft articles and help materials to guide me.
But I haven’t found proper articles and guidelines for UI design of asp .net pages.(may be its out there and i havent found yet?)
Can anyone through more light on this subject. Any good books ,suggestions etc?
Thanks in advance
SNC
If you want granular control over your HTML/XHTML output then I would recommend switching to ASP.NET MVC. The problems you've described are those typically encountered when using ASP.NET WebForms. As Anton mentions, you do need to gain a good understanding of XHTML and CSS as well.
While I definitly +1 everyone suggesting that you get a better grasp of CSS and positioning in general and ditch the drag and drop method of building your controls, I figure you need something sooner rather than later.
For that, I give you Yahoo!'s CSS Grids (JQuery, MooTools and other libraries also have grid layout tools) which will help you to get your UI done quickly. In the mean time read up on CSS.
(X)HTML is compositional - not unlike XAML (which is actually modeled on HTML/CSS). When building WinForms you can drag and drop your controls onto the window willy-nilly, but not so with the web. One thing the drag and drop designer misses is that (X)HTML components have a hierarchy to them. The designer tries to overcome this by using position: absolute; which is a precarious crutch.
Your controls need to be composed with their positional relationships more or less intact already and that means you'll have to edit the code by hand to put things in the proper order.
It's not the UI design per se. What you need is solid understanding of how CSS and generally styles work on the web (in short: they do poorly). So what you need is a good CSS book. Plus, you'll have to dump WYSIWYG ASP.NET page editor.
I'm curious if you feel your HTML skills are on par. Could you create this same page in HTML without visual studio and get the results you expect (using notepad)?
Regardless, start spending more time in the HTML markup and less time using the designer surface in Visual Studio. The more you understand the output that ASP.NET creates the better a web developer you will become.
A trick I use quite often is knowing that you don't need to recompile to change aspx code. Make your changes to the aspx file, save, and then refresh your browser. Also, use firefox and get the webdeveloper plugin. I use the outline block level elements quite often to understand where some of my html flow problems are occurring.
Read up on Web Design. I'm a bit behind but I've always loved zengarden and zeldman.. I'm sure there's better out there now.