Read the white paper now to learn how application styling will dramatically improve the productivity of your company's developers and designers.
See the evidence for yourself by downloading and evaluating NetAdvantage AppStylist (also included in NetAdvantage for .NET).
Applications are now as much about how you present information as what you present.
In the not too distant past, it was enough to have a developer select some data (e.g., a quarterly revenue report), and choose an appropriate user interface control fit for the task of presenting that as information (i.e., a four-column list view). The AERO (Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open) and Aqua user interfaces, from Microsoft and Apple, respectively, are just two examples of the kinds of advances on which users now judge their experience with your product. As progress continues in this space, the bar of user expectations you're expected to meet rises higher and higher.
Enterprises increasingly demand solutions on how to deal with:
Prior tooling in the marketplace focused too much attention on the developers' role. This created the market opportunity for a new framework, the Application Styling FrameworkTM (ASF), and tooling that would enhance the contributions of non-developers toward satisfying these enterprise goals.
Creating moving user experiences today increasingly requires two distinct, and very often exclusive, skill sets:
The challenge of modern presentation layer development is in how to effectively, efficiently, and effortlessly bring both disciplines into collaboration on the finished product.
NetAdvantage AppStylistTM tools for the Web (ASP.NET) and Windows Forms by Infragistics enhance the collaboration between your organization's talented craftsman. It changes the whole dynamic between developers and designers, streamlining their workflow so they can deliver more quickly, and at less cost.
Express Styling creates a complete style library for an application in as few as four steps. The style library can then be turned over to developers who can turn it on with as little as one line of code in the application. Both disciplines can continue to refine their work in parallel without adversely affecting the other.
Designers don't require the intensive platform knowledge they once did to support developers writing the application, because now their tooling — AppStylist was designed by visual designers for visual designers — makes tasks effortless. The framework, ASF, takes care of the technical details of managing hundreds or thousands of resources and CSS styles (your stylistic assets). Specialization of labor means that your designers now only need to share your vision, and possess the creativity to paint a positive picture.
There are key economic drivers beneath this movement making it more than merely superficial. You read about it in the news everyday, it is part and parcel of the New Digital Economy. The marketplace demands that IT solutions show increased worker productivity to sustain bottom-line growth.
Organizations like yours are realizing competitive benefits today from the increased productivity that comes with placing a more usable and better branded user experience on the face of their business applications. Application Styling is the technology to reduce the cost and shorten the turnaround to realizing these benefits.