When I first put together SproutCore, I created a purple-colored theme to style buttons, checkboxes, and so on.  The idea was to create a placeholder theme just until we could get something real done.

I’m happy to say that SproutCore 1.0 will retire the purple theme in favor of a new theme called Ace.  Ace was initially contributed to SproutCore by Cocoia.  It is now included using the new theme support.

If you don’t want to use Ace, that’s OK.  You can write a theme of your own.  If you do like Ace but you’d like to refine it a bit, you can do that too.  The entire theme, including the PSD is open source too under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Ace is not finished yet.  There are some rough edges for sure.  But I think its a great start and I hope you will too.

If you are design minded and see some ways to make the theme better, why not get in involved?  Checkout the source and make some changes.  There’s even a project page where we are tracking development.

To try Ace yourself check out the latest Sample Controls, which is now using it.  This code is built out of our nightly source so it may break now and then - but its a great place to get a feel for the new UI.  Check it out!

Try Ace in Sample Controls »