A Sneak Peak at Aristo 2 As the Cappuccino Conference in the states winds down, a sneak peak at Aristo 2 was announced over Twitter. Frequent readers will remember that Sofa designed the original theme for the Cappuccino framework - and my jQuery UI theme was based off of this.  Not only does the update refresh familiar UI components, it also includes an exciting new icon pack. From what you can see below, they’re nothing to laugh at either. A preliminary count shows 108 icons available in the same glyph style no doubt popularised by iOS and now OS X. The changes have already been reflected in the design section of Sofa’s website, but the PSD on their GitHub repository remains unchanged. You can get a more in depth view of both the UI components and the icon set by downloading the sneak peak of Aristo 2. So Will I Be Making an Aristo 2.0 jQuery UI Theme? Initially, no. I think that the original Aristo theme is still travelling along quite nicely. The design direction the new theme is taking is not entirely different enough to warrant the extra time. It’s also worth considering that a lot of the unique touches in Aristo 2 don’t translate that well to jQuery UI themes. The modal and datepicker are just different enough to cause a few cross-browser headaches. Other components like checkboxes, radio buttons and dropdowns aren’t natively supported - even if popular plugins do exist. Hats off as usual to Sofa, it’s no surprise they were acquired by Facebook.
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A Sneak Peak at Aristo 2

As the Cappuccino Conference in the states winds down, a sneak peak at Aristo 2 was announced over Twitter. Frequent readers will remember that Sofa designed the original theme for the Cappuccino framework - and my jQuery UI theme was based off of this.  Not only does the update refresh familiar UI components, it also includes an exciting new icon pack. From what you can see below, they’re nothing to laugh at either. A preliminary count shows 108 icons available in the same glyph style no doubt popularised by iOS and now OS X.

The changes have already been reflected in the design section of Sofa’s website, but the PSD on their GitHub repository remains unchanged.

You can get a more in depth view of both the UI components and the icon set by downloading the sneak peak of Aristo 2.

So Will I Be Making an Aristo 2.0 jQuery UI Theme?

Initially, no. I think that the original Aristo theme is still travelling along quite nicely. The design direction the new theme is taking is not entirely different enough to warrant the extra time. It’s also worth considering that a lot of the unique touches in Aristo 2 don’t translate that well to jQuery UI themes. The modal and datepicker are just different enough to cause a few cross-browser headaches. Other components like checkboxes, radio buttons and dropdowns aren’t natively supported - even if popular plugins do exist.

Hats off as usual to Sofa, it’s no surprise they were acquired by Facebook.

Introducing “Aristo”, A jQuery UI Theme

For those that arn’t familiar with jQuery UI, it’s essentially a collection of jQuery plugins that try to do for user interaction what jQuery did for JavaScript. Like it’s parent library, jQuery UI does its very best to remain cross browser compliant. It is easy to implement. It is very easy to theme. Unfortunately it hasn’t seen quite the same uptake as jQuery, and I set out on this task to improve the biggest hurdle I experienced: its design.

Frankly, jQuery UI themes are goofy. The rounded corners are goofy. The colour schemes are goofy. At this point you probably think I’m being a bit unreasonable, but compare jQuery UI to what the competition is up to:

Ace and Aristo are the respective open source themes of SproutCore and Cappuccino, applied to their parent JavaScript libraries. You can see a great comparison of the two in this article by Allen Pike. Both UI libraries duplicate the functionality of jQuery UI slightly, but look simply amazing doing so. I had already started mocking and building my own jQuery UI theme when I re-discovered the Aristo PSD. I decided to abandon my work and port the “Aristo” theme for Cappuccino over to jQuery UI.

So here we have Aristo for jQuery UI. A proof-of-concept to illustrate how jQuery UI could progress if they get sacrifice some of their direction and get some nifty designers on board. Imagine the possibilities if jQuery UI got Cocoia or Sofa on board!

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 with permission from 280 North and Pinvoke.