It seems the announcement of the upcoming UX Kits made quite a stir! We got a ton of emails in the last 24 hours. Thank you for your interest. The preview on the site is very sketchy, so here are some hard facts:
UX Kits are an evolution of our Reuxables Themes. While the themes were nothing more than a “style sheet”, the UX Kits resemble a Starter Kit. Apart from the WPF theme unique to each kit, the kit has additional templates that help you create a rich interface for your application, as well as adding some powerful user experience features.
Custom Windows
A good example of these features would be our WindowKit. It is a standard WPF Window written in XAML, but instead of the OS-provided window frame, it uses a custom window frame quite similar in structure to our free WPF Windows resource in the sense that everything is custom designed to match the theme, as well as provide useful functionality such as open surface dragging (any non-functional surface of the window can be used to drag the entire window).
Interrupt Prompts
While the UAC prompts in Windows Vista can be a pain, in some situations they can be useful. We’ve crossed the UAC-style interrupt prompts with the good old MessageBox, providing you with a custom dialog which appears “inside” the Window like a popup, but still is modal. Plus it is styled so that when the interrupt dialog comes up, the rest of the window goes out-of-focus, not just functionally but visually too as you can see in the preview. This can be disabled for low-end PCs, of course. A single application level boolean let’s you disable such over-the-top features, so you can even provide the end-user the option to decide for themselves whether they want performance or beauty.
The Interrupt Prompt is just ONE of many such unique features the Kits will have.
Visual Basic and C#
The UX Kits will ship in both VB and C#, with full source code. You will be able to customize any imaginable portion of the kit.
The Theme
All UX Kit themes will be available as individual themes for those who don’t want the Kit, but just the theme.
Cross-Kit Compatibility
All UX Kits will follow a singular themeing convention, so you will be able to dynamically change between Kits/themes in your application and still take advantage of the new unique features. The ResourceDictionaries will take care of the styling for you.
Convenience Packs
Soon after the release of the first UX Kits, we also intend to ship a convenience pack of UX Kits for our current phase themes. Super Pack users will get a free upgrade to these Kits as part of their Subscription upgrade, and individual theme users will get them at a very steep discount.
Pricing + Subscription
The UX Kits will be available as individually purchasable products as well as part of the new Subscription system.
The price for each new UX Kit will differ based on the product quality and complexity, but you can expect the range to be $139 to $299. Final prices will be announced soon.
Super Pack Free Upgrade
As part our free upgrade to the Subscription level for Super Pack customers, the new UX Kits will be given free of cost to all existing Super Pack customers. More information for this can be found here.
Questions or comments?
Email us at info at nukeation dot com.