I have just had the most hard core css intensive weekend ever. Then end product is that SoapBX has received a major update in the stylesheet and userinterface department.

I’ve wanted to have a much more flowing intuitive userinterface, however that can be one of the hardest things to do. SoapBX is an online application, not an online publication, so the user interface needs to be different than your regular weblog or similar application.

Eric Meyer the father of the CSS stylesheet that I use to format the presentations has also been busy. He has released version 1.1b4 of the S5 Stylesheets. I have updated SoapBX now to support this latest version, which has several neat new features as well as is much cleaner than before.

My presentation thumbnails pretty much emulate the layout of Eric’s slides now and I have most of the work done now, to allow people to create their own templates. All I really need for that now is the userinterface.

As I’ve said before, Ruby on Rails saves me from much of the annoyig plumbing that you have to spend a lot of time doing in the J2EE world, however I now have gotten so deep and dirty in css and dhtml that I otherwise wouldn’t have dared doing, that that has now been taking almost all my development time. I think the bases are now done for me to focus on the application now though.