Degrafa Button Explorer
admin originally posted this on Saturnboy.
Recently, I’ve been playing around with Degrafa in preparation for actually using it on an upcoming project at work. For those that aren’t in the know, Degrafa is a badass graphics framework for Flex. One of my favorite parts so far is the amazing leverage it brings to building custom-styled components. It’s terse and powerful, just the way I like it.
Building Buttons
With a very minimal amount of effort, I was able to create a few “web 2.0″ button skins. I just followed one of the millions of glass button photoshop tutorials, but did the work in mxml code using Degrafa’s declarative syntax. Here are my results (view source enabled):
Button Explorer
But then I decided to take it a step further and build out a Degrafa Button Explorer (with a small tip of the hat to the original Flex Style Explorer). The Degrafa Button Explorer allows you to adjust a bunch of properties and colors for all three buttons styles. It goes a step further than the original and provides not only the CSS, but also the full code of the stateful Degrafa-powered button components.
Digging Deeper: I’ve been following the skinning performance issues discovered by the guys at EffectiveUI. The most recent benchmarks appear to show that stateful Degrafa skins (like those produced by the Degrafa Button Explorer) are safe to use.