Book Image

jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

<p>Web applications today generally use at least some JavaScript to enhance the look and feel of the user interface. The jQuery UI toolkit gives web developers a set of widgets as well as a framework for developing and applying themes.</p> <p><em>jQuery UI Themes: Beginner's Guide</em> is for web developers who want to design professional-looking applications that are resilient to change. It is a step-by-step guide that goes beyond showing how to switch themes in a user interface built with jQuery UI and offers developers a practical guide to designing their own themes and gives them insight as to how themes work.</p> <p><em>jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide</em> starts with themes in general and why they're important in web applications today. We gradually move forward, covering jQuery UI basics, eventually aiming for a full understanding of the theme framework. The ThemeRoller application is a powerful tool – allowing developers to easily adjust theme settings. In addition to seeing how the ThemeRoller works, we take a more in-depth look at the CSS framework internals allowing readers to develop the ability to adjust themes in ways the ThemeRoller cannot. This includes everything from special effects to theming custom widgets. There is no limit to what your theme can change.</p> <p>Once you've read this book, you'll no only be well-versed in theming jargon, you'll also be able to take one look at any jQuery UI application and understand why and how it looks the way it does.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
jQuery UI Themes Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Theme icon sets


Now that we have a firm understanding of how theme icons work in jQuery UI, and we understand how icon sprites work within the framework, it's time to create some icons of our own.

As we've seen throughout the previous chapters in this book, the jQuery UI theme framework puts a large emphasis on providing a consistent look and feel. You can tell that two widgets, a date-picker and a progress bar for example, belong to the same theme. The same is true of theme icons in the framework. The same set of icons exists in all themes. When extending the theme icons, it is best to be conservative. Chances are there that there is an icon that can already represent what you're looking for. The "less is more" principle is especially fruitful when it comes to managing theme icons.

The examples in this section use the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Tool) for modifying the jQuery UI icon sprites. GIMP is freely available at http://www.gimp.org/ and runs on all major operating systems. Although...