the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for March, 2011
Sencha Touch Theming: Building Our Custom Stylesheet with SASS
Mar 7th
Ok, let’s recap. So far, we’ve looked at some basic concepts related to how to approach modifying a Sencha Touch app theme, as well as walked through exactly how all the pieces fit together in the SASS magic. With all this behind us, it’s finally time to create a custom .scss file–let’s get started!
Setting Things UpIn the following example, we’ll be doing some minor riffs on the standard sencha-touch.css file. If you’re in the mood for a super-customized theme of your own, well, you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. Instead of jumping headfirst into something like that, why not start with some small changes, and build from there?
First things first, we need to decide where we want our new .scss file to live. While we can put it in the /resources/sass/ folder where the other core ones are, for this example we’ll create a new folder at the same level…just to keep things straight. I’m going to call mine “custom” (pretty creative, eh?).
Now, in order for us to let Compass know where our .scss file lives, we need to create our own config.rb file (check out the last post for more info about this). I’ll create that file, and here’s More >
Sencha Touch Theming: The Lay of the Land
Mar 6th
If you followed the steps in the last post on setting up your development environment to leverage SASS, you should be all set to start rocking some seriously awesome custom themes for your Sencha Touch app. But before you dive in, you might take a few moments to take a deep breath and survey all that’s going on to build out the default Sencha Touch theme.
It’s not that you couldn’t immediately jump in and produce something awesome–you definitely could, and it would be pretty simple. I suggest browsing the default theme, however, because despite how easy it is to being customizing your own .scss file with new colors, icon masks, and whatever else strikes your fancy, actually understanding (if even in a very preliminary sort of way) what’s going on will help prevent future frustrations that may dampen your sudden excitement to start theming.
With that thought in mind, let’s take a few moments to peek around the default theme to see how the magic happens.
config.rbIn your Sencha Touch installation, browse to /resources/sass/. In this folder, you’ll see a file named config.rb. This file, written in Ruby, is one of those “setup it up and leave it alone” kind of files. More >
Sencha Touch Theming: Getting Started
Mar 5th
If you’ve worked with Sencha Touch for more than 5 minutes, you have GOT to appreciate the aesthetics which the framework brings out of the box. You literally have to do nothing at all in order to get a slick, polished looking interface that works in webkit browsers and on iPhone and Android devices.
However, if you’re like me, you probably get to the point with your apps where you want to customize the look and feel. I mean, while the Sencha Touch default palette is nice, it’s pretty generic, so before long you’ll need to start developing a custom theme for your app.
An Abortive StartInitially, this can be a challenge with Sencha Touch apps. The challenge stems not from the fact that anything magical is happening behind the scenes: it’s just JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML after all. Rather, it’s the way that it’s all packaged up.
If you take a look at one of the stylesheets, you’ll notice how crazy complicated they are. Let’s say you wanted to change the color of all the navigation backgrounds, for example. Well, you could use Chrome’s developer tools to inspect each and every interface, grab the selectors, and then try to overwrite them with a More >
God is Not at the End of the Universe
Mar 4th
God is not at the end of the universe. One could encapsulate within oneself the whole of knowledge that there is to be had about and within the universe, and one would still be no closer to verifying nor invalidating the existence of God.
Gods existence cannot be rationalized epistemologically — it is only through the super-rational assent of faith that the existence of God can be beheld. Anything else, in the words if Mr. Hume, would only be a curious “offspring of the brain“.
So from the perspective of human epistemology, agnostics (the real ones) are on the right track in this regard. Where they falter is, firstly, buying into the spurious notion that knowledge must occur along the lines of the materialist/objectivist paradigm in which most of the Western world is currently entrapped; and, secondly, concluding that this is sufficient reason to discontinue the quest.
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