Early Findings on Sencha Touch

Owned by Jesse Jones (Unlicensed)
Mar 13, 2012
2 min read

After going through the theming more I've realized a couple things:

Bad News

  • The barrier to entry for UI/UX designers is much steeper than I anticipated. For theming Sencha uses Sass CSS (.scss) and then compiles it as standard CSS for optimization. This is good and bad. It's good because if you know Sass already it makes theming incredibly easy. However, if you don't it might be somewhat tortuous. According to the Sass website, "The new main syntax (as of Sass 3 http://sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.SASS_CHANGELOG.html#3-0-0 is known as “SCSS” (for “Sassy CSS”), and is a superset of CSS3’s syntax." This is not difficult at all if you have a some kind of programming background.
  • Here's the Sass website for more info:
    http://sass-lang.com/
  • Sencha also uses Compass. (Which is based on Sass)
    http://compass-style.org/
  • If you don't already know this technologies, its best to learn them so you can take advantage of the benefits that come with knowing them. 

Good News

  • Sencha touch is bundled with Icons. A LOT of icons. Over 300 icons are included that cover a wide assortment of use.
  • The icons Sencha comes bundled with are the Pictos iconset.
    http://pictos.cc/
  • We can freely use the included icons as part of the Sencha license.
  • The biggest benefit this gives us is we have a HUGE jumpstart on icons and we don't have to make all the "basic" icons ("Calendar", "Delete", "Close", etc.). We still need to make some icons that'll apply to specific areas, i.e. OPD, however, we still have a big jump if we leverage some of the icons bundled with Sencha.

In short, those were some of my findings. I'm still going through the Sencha documentation and theming, note I'm only doing experiements, trying to uncover some other aspects of it.
I still need to go through Sencha EXT Core.

Best,
Jesse