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Sencha Touch Theme Contest

April 19, 2011 | David Kaneda

I am extremely excited to announce our second contest for Sencha Touch, a theming competition geared toward designers. We have some fantastic, designery prizes lined up, including a MacBook Air, a BlackBerry PlayBook, and three iPad 2s.

The contest is simple: Build and submit a theme (just a CSS file) for our demo app, Roookies. Roookies is a browser for Dribbble — a popular design sharing site — that highlights “shots” from new players, or “rookies.” To get you started we have already created a sample theme (included in the download), created by Jen Gordon from Tapptics. Once all of the entries have been collected, we will judge them on three main factors which are overall design/feel, cross-platform support, and technical prowess (otherwise known as Sass-fu).

For those who haven’t already tried it, theming a Sencha Touch application is easy — thanks in large part to our use of Compass and Sass. These two technologies help abstract our themes so designers can manipulate variables like “$base-color” and “$base-gradient” to make sweeping changes to the application style. All of this, of course, comes in addition to the ability to use plain old CSS to style.

Also, we want to include some typographic freedom, so designers are also able to to submit the name of a Google Web Font to be included on the page. For additional info on theming Sencha Touch, watch my presentation on the subject from last year’s SenchaCon. Lastly, we have added a new page to our Sencha Touch Docs documenting the many variables and mixins built into our theming system.

So designers, fire up Photoshop and Textmate and let’s see some beautiful themes!

Contest Details Sample App