When using the Aspire UI library, each component instance will attempt to compute its own “ideal” preferred size if its size is not explicitly set. This “ideal” size typically means the minimum size at which the component may render itself fully (or sufficiently without appearing distorted), taking into account its child display objects such as labels or embedded images, if any.

To be very clear, for any Aspire UI component, if width and height is explicitly set, then this explicit size becomes the preferred size. This means that if you set the size of a component instance explicitly, you are overriding what the component deems to be ideal.

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There is a Flash Player issue that arises when you play a short sound effect in the absence of any other sound playing. If your application plays a sound effect when there is not already another sound playing, then your application will experience some lag (length of lag depends on the performance of the client machine).

Things will seem to freeze for that short moment, and then the sound effect plays, and then execution of code resumes.

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With the Aspire UI library, you can use the background property defined in the uiComponent class to draw a background behind component instances. By default, no background will be drawn. Typically, only containers will use this property.

In the case of the uiImage component, the background property can be used in conjunction with the padding property to draw a simple solid border around the displayed image:

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In the flash.filters package, you can find several image filter effects you can apply to any DisplayObject instance – BevelFilter, BlurFilter, ColorMatrixFilter, ConvolutionFilter, DisplacementMapFilter, DropShadowFilter, GlowFilter, GradientBevelFilter, and GradientGlowFilter.

To apply one or more of these image filter effects to a display object, set the filters property of the respective DisplayObject instance to an Array containing the filter object(s).

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The uiWindow container does not automatically embed any scroll pane since this is not always required by its content. For example, the window may be set to be non-resizable and is big enough to show all the content. Or you may decide that the content should be scaled/resized to fit the viewable area.

If scrollable content is required, you may implement it using the uiScrollPane class – create a uiScrollPane instance and add it to the content of the uiWindow instance. You would then add child display objects to the content of the uiScrollPane instance, instead of the content of the uiWindow container itself.

The fillX and fillY properties of the uiScrollPane instance should be set to true to enable automatic resizing when the uiWindow container is resized.

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The TIOBE Programming Community Index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index for August 2009 has been released and Objective-C enters top 20 (at position 19), surpassing ActionScript (at position 22).

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UPDATE: You may also refer to Domain Locking SWFs, because by domain locking (site locking) a SWF, you would prevent it from running locally as well.

The Flash platform is a client-side platform. As a client-side platform, it is fairly easy for end-users to get a copy of online-deployed SWFs from the browser’s cache. There are also browser plugins that make this even easier (often requiring only a few mouse clicks), saving end-users the hassle of looking through the browser’s cache for the right file(s) to copy.

Depending on your application, having end-users run your online-deployed SWF locally may not be what you want.

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UPDATE: You may also refer to Hiding the Built-In Native MenuBar (And ContextMenu Items).

In my opinion, the native right-click context menu is an odd legacy from the Flash Movies days. It may be useful when Flash is used as a video player, for animations and cartoons, in the absence of any proper custom UI.

If you are developing Flash applications, you should consider always hiding the native right-click Flash Player context menu’s built-in items. Sure, you cannot get rid of the context menu completely, but you should at least hide the built-in items. It makes the application look a lot more professional because the long list of built-in items are mostly irrelevant.

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