By default, the SWFs you publish will show a native menu bar (the pull down menu showing the items File – View – Control – Help) when run locally. The same case applies to Projector (.exe) files published either from the Adobe Flash IDE, or created from local SWFs using the File – Create Projector… menu item from the native pull down menu.

In my opinion, this menu does not add any functionality to any Flash application, is as useless as the built-in contextMenu items, and should always be hidden. Luckily, it takes only one line of code to hide the menu.

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The Aspire UI library, for pure ActionScript 3 development, has been updated to version 1.3 (changelog).

Among the many improvements, the most important is implementing support for the use of packaged themes. The Aspire UI library uses external PNG images for component skinning, which means that skin assets can be easily modified by theme designers using any image editor (capable of exporting to the PNG format).

With the Aspire UI Version 1.3 Update, the skinning work flow has been further enhanced by allowing developers to optionally use packaged themes.

It is now possible to compress skin assets from a theme folder, along with the “rules.xml” file, into one single binary file.

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