Nukeation Studios, a leader in Windows Presentation Foundation™ (WPF) and User Experience (UX) solutions has released reuxables, a range of designer themes for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft Expression Blend™.
Reuxables themes are aimed at the fresh new market of WPF applications, and allow software developers to easily implement a new look for their applications with lots of features:

• The reuxables library consists of 6 fully customizable themes, each with their own unique variations that result in a total of 48 different styles.
• The themes are designed by some of the top artists in the UX design industry.
• Reuxables themes provide a consistent look regardless of the operating system, and therefore provide the same look on both Windows Vista™ and Windows® XP.
• Reuxables are completely compatible with both .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5.
• All reuxables themes are provided in both Static and Animated versions, both made from native XAML vector objects.
• Implementing reuxables is effortless as they automatically theme the entire application as soon as the theme file is added to the project.
• Reuxables themes are fully compatible with both Microsoft Expression Blend™ 1.0/1.1 and Visual Studio® 2008.

System requirements include Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 or 3.5 for runtime, and Microsoft Expression Blend 1.0/1.1 or Visual Studio 2008 for development. Individual reuxables themes are available between $19 to $99, with an additional complete collection pack for $299.
A complete demonstration of all themes is available at: http://www.reuxables.com

Dax also made some screencasts demonstrating how easy it is to drop reuxables into either VS2008 or Expressions Blend....

My buddy and podcast-partner Dax has released reuxables, a theme framework for WPF applications.  Dax has been working with WPF and Silverlight since pre-alpha, and has had a passion for UX development forever.   Something that I've always struggled with as a developer is the fact that my UI's are either boxy (tr's and td's) or gun-metal-grey win-form's.  While Dax kept telling me how easy it was to add a little style to interfaces, the best I could ever do was to send him my HTML, and he'd send back something that looked awesome.   With reuxables, through the magic of inheritance and injection, you code up your WPF application, and then select the theme.  Every control on the page is auto-magically themes--- professional UX's at a fraction of the cost --- wow.  I wish I would have learned earlier in my career how important the UX is -- when you are briefing the boss, they need to see a good looking UI, or you won't get your next funding cycle.

Check them out, and download a trial -- you'll be glad you did!

Dax Pandhi talks WPF and Expression
Graphics guru and WPF wonk Dax Pandhi shares his thoughts on WPF, WPF/e, Expression suite in general, and Blend in particular. You'll hear the story of how Dax came to be the Pwop graphics guy as well as his contributions to the WPF community.

Listen to the show..

Dax and I recorded episode #5 of revolUXions and just posted it.  I wanted to really understand the integration and workflow issues which XAML and MS-Blend is going to help us solve.  I've worked with so many designers in the past where the work product has been a Photoshop-file.  On past projects, a few weeks before ship, I get a photoshop file containing the look and feel of the product.  Not anymore -- as we show in this episode, the designer (working in MS Blend) hands off a DLL file which encapsulates the look and feel of the app, while the developer (working in VisualStudio) just 'add a reference' to the new DLL, and all the interface components change  to the new look.

Running time: 12:04

Dax and I are hard at work on the next revolUXions.  We haven’t recorded the episode yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.  Being a developer, I’m always worried about trying to integrate the design and the application at the last minute.  I’ve been on many projects where the last weekend was spent trying to cut and paste the designers graphics into the site, only to have the site look hickly-pickly.  For the first several episodes we’ve spent exploring the Blend, but to me it really doesn’t matter how good it looks until we try to integrate the graphic look and feel into the final application.  In this episode Dax is going to design some dark tone-on-tone reflective buttons in Blend, hand them off to me as a DLL, and I’m going to integrate them into my Visual Studio 2005 project to create an application.  Isn’t this the promise, that Designers can Design, and Developers can Develop, each in their own environment? 

Stay tuned…

Dax and I recordered another revolUXions.  This time we take a look at one of the most innovative features of WPF - animations. We create a custom button and apply mouse hover animation to it.

Running time: 09:42

revolUXions.

Handy tip Dax showed me during our last revolUXions, in Expression Blend. 

Pressing the ‘tab’ key will hide all the windows, so you just see the work area.  Very handy for when you have multiple windows cluttering your screen…

We revisit the Flickr RSS application on the revolUXions and try to enhance it with ‘hyper tooltips’.

What Dax showed me during the show is that Expressions Blend isn’t doing anything magic, it’s just producing XAML.  During the show, I went and edited the XAML, cutting and pasting code blocks into the ‘tool-tip’ event….tres cool…

Running time: 14:25 

Dax, I was working on the example from our last video, and “the developer” in me came out.  (You know, the developer who can’t draw a straight line with a ruler and whose every dialog box had the gun-metal-grey look and feel?)

I was wondering if XAML somehow has ‘inheritance or something similar to CSS.  The buttons in the screencast looked great when you did them, but when I tried to draw them, well, it didn’t look so nice. 

Is there a mechanism to externalize that design?  Can you (the designer) make a button and then package the look and feel into an external file that I (a developer) can just include in my project?

Update: Dax explains how it’s done!

In this episode of the RevolUXion, Dax and I take a look at how easy it is to customize existing controls by customizing templates and using triggers. All this is done without writing a single line of code.

Running time: 12:46