No dumb blonde

So my direct boss is having a go at me again about the way my application looks. It's not that the app is all skew-whiff and ramshackle, with text items all over the place like alphabet magnets on a fridge door, but I admit that it won't be winning any beauty pageants any time soon. (I'm using the Light Blue theme, which I think is the coolest of the themes that come packaged with Apex 3.)

The problem is that I'm working to such a tight deadline and I've got miles of specs left unploughed. I haven't got the time to put make-up on the application. That'll have to wait till later.

The thing that makes my boss such a good boss is the same thing that makes him a rubbish boss at times: he loves tech. As long as it's new and shiny and being written about in tech magazines he loves it. And since he's too busy to try stuff out himself he's always on at me to try them. And ever since he stumbled across Ext JS (which is this really cool javascript library) he's been badgering me to use it to pretty up my app.

"When a client looks at an application for the first time," he said to me, "70% of his first impression comes from the look of it, only 30% of it is based on functionality. So make it prettier!"

The thing that sucks about this whole thing is that I agree with him. And the reason I agree with him is that I made up that bloody fact. Back in the days when we used to develop butt-ugly apps in Oracle Forms I used to have a go at him all the time that we needed to make our products prettier, and to convince him I made up this beauty-versus-functionality percentage thing. And now he's using it on me!

So, if anyone out there has some suggestions on how I can make an Apex app pretty, in ways that go beyond simply applying a pre-packaged theme but won't take too much time - and don't require much more than the basic skills of an Oracle Forms developer - then I'md love to hear them.

Oh, and on a total tangent: are all women crazy or is it just the ones I go out with? Or perhaps there's something about going out with me that drives them to craziness.