Alpha Software Blog



Alpha Anywhere: Using "Sub-Themes" to Style Controls in mobile apps

Over the last 10 or 15 years, look and style has become increasingly important in business application development and is often a key determinant in the marketplace success of  desktop. web and mobile business applications. At Alpha we have recognized this and one of the important new capabilities in Alpha Five v11 is the "Style Builder". As you would expect, we have been paying a lot of attention to the look of mobile business applications that can be built in our upcoming Alpha Anywhere mobile app development platform.

Using "sub-themes" to style controls on UX components

When you select a style for a component (for example ‘iOS’), all of the controls (e.g. buttons, labels, etc) are styled in a certain way. The style definitions actually contain multiple different definitions for certain controls. For example, a button can be styled as a ‘confirm’, ‘deny’, ‘navigate back’, or ‘navigate next’ button, simply by selecting the appropriate ‘sub-theme’. It is also possible to add your own ‘sub-themes’ to a style definition. In this video we introduce the concept of style ‘sub-themes’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs9Q9ppQPKU  

A "behind the scenes" look at component style sub-themes in mobile business applications

This video is for advanced developers who are interested in how sub-themes are actually implemented. Knowing how sub-themes are implemented makes it very easy to add you own sub-themes to a component style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWvhN3ur1PY
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About Author

Richard Rabins
Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.


The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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