Download the Pixate Framework package from http://www.pixate.com/ and copy the PXEngine.framework folder into vendor directory (or alternatively just create a symbolic link). Create the vendor directory if it does not exist. You should have something like this.

$ ls vendor/PXEngine.framework
/Headers/   PXEngine   Resources/ Versions/

Edit the Rakefile of your RubyMotion project and add the following require lines.

require 'rubygems'
require 'motion-pixate'

Still in the Rakefile, set up the user, key and framework variables in your application configuration block.

Motion::Project::App.setup do |app|
  # ...
  app.pixate.user = 'USER ID'
  app.pixate.key  = 'KEY CODE'
  app.pixate.framework = 'vendor/PXEngine.framework'
end

Create the default.css in resources directory.

Note: To install the motion-pixate gem, see the RubyGems site.

Example

We'll take the Timer example that comes with RubyMotion and add Pixate and quickly style the application. Start by following the Setup steps above to add Pixate to the Timer project.

Type rake to make sure everything is good so far. You should see the Timer app running.

Add the CSS File

In the default.css file you added prior, let's add a simple entry:

	button {
		background: red;
	}

Rake again and you should see this:

Let's pretty this button up with the following CSS:

	button {
		color            : #446620;
		background-color : linear-gradient(#87c44a, #b4da77);
		border-width     : 1px;
		border-color     : #84a254;
		border-radius    : 10px;
		font-size        : 15px;
		font-weight      : bold;
	}

Rake again and you should see this:

Add a Styling ID

Lastly, let's change the background color. Let's add an ID to our background view. In the timer_controller.rb file, add the following line before the end of viewDidLoad:

	view.styleId = 'myView'

What's we've done here is add a styleId to the view so we can style it by name. Now add the following CSS after your button CSS that was already added:

	#myView {
		background: linear-gradient(#000000, #f2f4f6);
	}

Now you have a beautiful interface with just a few lines of CSS!

SASS

Pixate gem supports Sass to generate the stylesheet. Create the sass directory and default.scss with the rake pixate:init command. Then, rake pixate:sass command generates the stylesheet from default.scss.

You could specify the Sass output style through style environment variable. For example,

$ rake pixate:sass style=compressed

You could use nested, expanded, compact and compressed as output style.

Pixate gem provides "style" method in REPL. You could change the stylesheet at the moment in REPL. For example,

(main)> style "button { color : blue; }"
(main)> style "button { background-color: red; border-radius: 20pt; }"