Overview
Aspire UI, developed by GhostWire Studios, is a library of Actionscript 3.0 (AS3) classes for building flexible and lightweight UI elements in Adobe Flash applications.
The Aspire UI Framework is written in AS3 from the ground up and is intended to be used in an “all-code” environment (no visual drag-n-drop component is available for use inside the Adobe Flash CS3 IDE).
Key features include easy skinning using PNG image files, automatic tab focus ordering, CSS text styles, and layout management.
Example
Features Easy Skinning
Skinning of components is done completely via PNG bitmap images. You can either embed the bitmap assets within your SWF, or you can let Aspire UI load from external PNG files (recommended). This means that skin/theme designers do not need to write a single line of code (and therefore allowing roles of coding and skin-designing to be kept totally separate). Keeping the skin assets in external PNG files also makes it easy to customize the look of your Flash application without the need to recompile. You can also more clearly examine the size of your "code-only" portion of your application.
(See Blog Aspire UI Preview: Skinning)
(See Tutorial Introduction to Skinning)
Layout Management
Components in Aspire UI have “layout hints” properties such as alignX, alignY, fillX, fillY, padding and margin. Aspire UI Components Set 1 ships with a uiBox class, which is a container that automatically arranges its child objects sequentially horizontally or vertically.
(See Blog Aspire UI Preview: Layout)
(See Tutorial Using uiBox)
Automatic Tab Focus Management
Aspire UI has its own focus manager that overrides the native behavior of the Flash Player. The focus chain is set up automatically based on the containment hierarchy - it is unnecessary to assign any tabIndex in your application code. In other words, you just need to decide on the child index order, and the tab focus chain will follow that order.
(See Blog Aspire UI Preview: Tab Focus Management)
(See Tutorial Automatic Tab Focus Ordering)
Advanced Text Styling
In Aspire UI, you can define text styles via an external css file. By default, Aspire UI will load a text.css file stored in the theme’s folder. In addition to the usual text format properties, you can define an “outline” and a “shadow” property (both are color properties).
The “outline” property when defined will cause the an outline to be drawn on the text glyphs. This is commonly seen in video subtitles. The “shadow” property when defined will cause the text cast a subtle shadow, resulting in either a raised or lowered look depending on the color combinations.
(See Blog Aspire UI Preview: Text Styles)
(See Tutorial Using Text Styles)
Overview
