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](http://www.apple.com/macbookair/), a [BlackBerry PlayBook](http://us.blackberry.com/playbook-tablet/), and three [iPad 2s](http://www.apple.com/ipad/).
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 (http://senchalearn.github.com/roookies/?style=demo) (included in the download), created by Jen Gordon from [Tapptics](http://tapptics.com). 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](https://www.sencha.com/blog/an-introduction-to-theming-sencha-touch). 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](http://www.google.com/webfonts) to be included on the page. For additional info on theming Sencha Touch, watch [my presentation on the subject](http://vimeo.com/17879651) from last year’s SenchaCon. Lastly, [we have added a new page to our Sencha Touch Docs](http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/touch/docs/theme/) 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!
Cool contest idea. Looking forward to see the results. :)
Or you could even enter it :-)
Yeah – looking forward to people’s creativity too!
Nice… we’re skinning a web app for one of our clients right now. I’ll check with them if it’s ok for us to submit it.
Great to hear, Julian! Hopefully it works out.
Roookies Link to github is wrong. Happy Theming! ;)
Good idea! I wish I had some free time to enter the contest, looks like a fun experience :)
Could use a theming page like that for Ext 4!
Great! I can not miss this contest! I already have cool ideas in my mind ;)
Is it allowed to add extra html elements to the application, like a simple div, p, etc.?
Andrea, we’re judging people on what they can do with CSS (or Sass). The entries comprise a CSS URL at the very least.
However, you could also fork the repo and show us what you could have done if you’d been allowed to edit the JS too – just for the props!
Andrea — Just also want to point out that, because we’re targeting mobile WebKit, there is also a lot of design you can add using :before/:after pseudo-elements :) Good luck!
@James / @David: Thank you both for your replies guys.
I really hope to complete my idea just in time for the deadline :)
what a good idea you have ,now come on!
ehehe you will see it :) I really hope to find some free time to join to contest, in these days I’m really full of work, otherwise I will show it on the forum when the contest ends :)
Can we submit more than one theme?
(I might have read the rules too fast…)
Go for it! Nothing in the rules about forbidding multiple entries ;-)
Woaw!! I’m in!! too bad that we can’t modify the JS :(
Still a question: (I’m like a spammer on this post :) )
Does the theme need to be focus on basketball or we are free to think about something else?
I ask you because I see the icon and splash screen of the application focus on that subject, and if we can only provide a css, then the theme will not fit with this two elements.
Andrea — you’re definitely welcome to do any style theme for the app you’d like. We’ll be judging based solely on the theme, and, if yours wins and you’d prefer a different icon/startup to show it off, we’ll be happy to work in later :)
Has anyone else noticed that the demo theme uses inline-images for the wooden background that don’t work on Android? I’m going to have to externally reference my images for this reason…
Great idea!
That’s really tihinnkg out of the box. Thanks!
You got to push it-this eesnsital info that is!