ninja captain

Everybody has seen it. I’m sure Google will give us some options in the future to change it’s appearance, but for now it’s just there. It doesn’t necessarily look bad, it just might not fit with your browser’s overall theme. Well you don’t have to tolerate it. There is an addon called Stylish (Chrome, Firefox) that allows users to inject custom CSS to specific pages. So we’re going to do just that.

After you’ve installed the addon, go to the options and add a new style:

/* main bar background */
#gbx4{
  background-color: #f6f6f6!important;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #b6bac0!important;
}
 
/* main bar text */
.gbts{
  color: #777!important;
}
 
/* current tab */
.gbp1 .gbts{
  color: #333!important;
  background-color: #ddd!important;
}
 
/* current tab highlight */
.gbp1 .gbtb2 {
  border-top-color: #5893d6!important;
}
 
/* tab hover */
.gbzt-hvr span, .gbt .gbgt-hvr span{
  color: #fff!important;
  background-color: #888!important;
}

Note: We add !important to each parameter because some of google’s existing code will overwrite ours without it.

Firefox

Chrome

After implementing the above code, you should see this anywhere on the google.com domain:

Obviously, you can change these colors to whatever you like. The above style matches my current Chrome theme.

When applications made in Adobe Flash are resized, the default behavior is to scale the entire application. With Flex however, the default behavior is to resize the dimensions of the application container, without resizing any components. This is useful if you have designed a layout with relative positioning and sizing. But if you want your application to actually increase the size of each component, you will need to make a minor adjustment.

Add an event handler to the main application for addedToStage:

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<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
	layout="absolute" addedToStage="stretchHandler()">

And here’s the code for stretchHandler():

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private function stretchHandler():void{
	stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.SHOW_ALL;
	stage.align = StageAlign.TOP;
	this.width = stage.stageWidth;
	this.height = stage.stageHeight;
}

The SWF on the left is the flex application at its normal dimensions (160×80). The SWF on the right is the exact same SWF file, but I embedded it using double dimensions (320×160).

I don’t know about everyone else, but I think the default component skins in Flex 4 are a big mistake. Well, let me be clear: I know the new Spark components are now easier to customize. And that is great. I am all for improving customization and usability. But some people don’t like skinning the default components! Would it have been so hard to improve the functionality while still making the default skins pretty? Like the Halo skins from Flex 3? One of the best things about Flex 3 is that I could just pop in a bunch of UI elements and it would be a great-looking application right out of the box. With the addition of Spark, I am now forced to customize the look of the components.

So, for starters, I’ve corrected one of the main faults, which is the font. I found that simply changing the default Spark font, it makes a big impact. All you have to do is add the following style code to your application:

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<fx:Style>
	@namespace s "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark";
	s|Application{
		font-family: "Verdana";
		font-size: 10;
	}
</fx:Style>

As you can see in the example below, the left UI is the default skin. The right UI is with this minor font change. I think it makes a big difference:
(Either JavaScript is not active or you are using an old version of Adobe Flash Player. Please install the newest Flash Player.)

I’m sure there are some other things I can do globally, to make Spark a little better-looking out of the box. The font is just a small step in the right direction.

Another Method

 
Now, I will say that there’s another method of forcing the compiler to use the Halo skins. I don’t like this method though. For starters, the proper skins don’t show up in Design View. Also there are a few syntax issues with mixing the skins. Having said that, if you want to go that route, you can: Go to your project properties, then go to Flex Compiler, and append this text to the Additional compiler arguments:

    -theme=${flexlib}/themes/Halo/halo.swc