We have added a new licensing option for the Aspire UI Components (Flash ActionScript 3.0) toolkit. For teams with more than 15 developers, this option translates to significant savings.

A Site License grants all developers located at the same site, working for the same organization, the rights to use the toolkit, royalty-free. It doesn’t matter how many developers work at the site, it doesn’t matter how many projects the developers will be using the toolkit in, and it doesn’t matter how many copies of your applications get distributed.

A “Site” is defined as a single location with the same mailing address. In other words, the developers must work in the same country, city, building, and on the same floor. This entitlement extends to temporary and freelance developers working at the site, as long as they remained engaged by your organization.

Aspire UI Components
Aspire UI is a library of Actionscript 3.0 (AS3) classes for building flexible and lightweight UI elements in Adobe Flash applications. Key features of the components include easy skinning using PNG image files, automatic tab focus ordering, CSS text styles, and layout management.

This is a pure AS3 library with no dependency on the Flex framework.

For more information, please click here.

You may experiment with the various features by downloading the trial version.

The developers at ActiveCaptain have been using the Aspire UI Components toolkit for over a year now. In this article, we take a quick look at their latest Flash web application, an interactive cruising guide.

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MDM Zinc™ 3.0 is a feature-rich Rapid Application Development Tool for turning SWFs into stunning commercial cross-platform desktop applications, screensavers, widgets, CD roms, DVD’s, kiosks and more. The AspireUI AS3 library uses PNG image files for component skinning, and this ease of skinning is a good fit for Zinc™ 3.0 projects, especially if you would like to create applications that look like native desktop applications. The toolkit currently comes with four component themes – “classic”, “xp”, “vista” and “graylic”. The first three aforementioned themes are Windows OS lookalike themes.

In this short tutorial, we will look at how you can use the AspireUI library in Zinc™ 3.0 projects, and how you can easily swap component themes by simply changing one line of code.

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The Trial Version of the Aspire UI library has been updated to v1.3.4 and is now available for download at
http://ghostwire.com/aspireui/download/

* The trial version is strictly for evaluation purposes.

* Compiled SWFs will stop working after a few minutes.

* This trial version is based off Aspire UI Standard Edition v1.3.4.

* Includes the assets for “classic”, “graylic” and “xp” themes.

* Aspire UI is an ActionScript 3.0 library – compiled SWFs must target Flash Player 9+.

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The Aspire UI Components library, for pure ActionScript 3.0 development, now ships with four themes – “classic”, “graylic”, “vista” and “xp”. These themes are included to demonstrate the versatility of the skinning workflow; developers are not limited to these themes but can design their own themes via PNG images.

By default, components in the toolkit uses external PNG images loaded during run-time for component skinning. As of version 1.3, skin assets of the same theme can be compressed and packed into a single binary file, facilitating run-time loading and also making it easy to embed the skin assets if so desired.

As at the time of this post, the sizes of the compressed packed version of the themes are as follows:

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The default behavior of the uiWindow container is to cast a drop shadow when it is active in the foreground, and not do so when it is inactive or when it is maximized to fill the stage. This behavior is determined by the component instance’s background property value.

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The uiImage class is used to display an image, the source of which can either be a MovieClip symbol in the library, or an external SWF/GIF/JPG/PNG file.

When using external bitmap images (GIF/JPG/PNG), the uiImage class will load from the external source only once and use cached data if the same source is requested subsequently again by the same or other uiImage instances. This is efficient because the same BitmapData is used across different uiImage instances that use the same image source. This is why image icons in Aspire UI scrollable lists do not suffer from the “flickering” symptom (which you will experience when using Flash/Flex components).

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The previous demo of the new “vista” theme featured mainly the uiWindow component.

Here is another demo featuring various UI components, including the checkbox, radiobutton, tabview, sliders and steppers (this is the same demo included in the library distribution but with the “vista” theme applied):

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A new bonus theme, emulating the look of Windows Vista OS, has been added to the Aspire UI components library. Below is a live demo (click on the three buttons to bring up windows):

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The com.ghostwire.ui.data.uiModel class is used to represent a collection of items used as data source for various components in the Aspire UI library. Data-driven components such as the uiComboBox, uiListBox, uiMenu, uiMenuBar, and uiTabView are populated using uiModel objects.

A uiModel object can be populated using an array of data objects (duplicates will be ignored), an array of strings, or an XML object. When populating using XML, the XML can either be embedded with the rest of your application code, or loaded from an external XML file during run-time.

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