Mar 13 2010
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.
Feb 27 2010
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.
Jan 04 2010
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.
Dec 16 2009
If you are looking to compile SWFs into cross-platform desktop applications, leveraging powerful desktop-only APIs, you may want to consider MDM Zinc 3.0. Available for Windows & Mac OSX, Zinc™ 3.0 is the fastest, most powerful and most feature-rich Rapid Application Development Tool for Adobe® Flash® and Flex®. With Zinc 3.0, you can rapidly create stunning commercial Applications, Screensavers, Widgets, CD Roms, DVD’s, Kiosks and More.
Dec 14 2009
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:
Dec 13 2009
This post is a supplement to “Serializing Bitmaps (Storing BitmapData As Raw Binary/ByteArray)”. In that article, we looked at how to convert BitmapData to a ByteArray, save that ByteArray, and re-construct the BitmapData from the saved ByteArray.
It is important to note that the technique saves the ByteArray “as is” in a flat binary file without any header or any block of metadata – this means that the file will in itself not be able to communicate its data structure and therefore, proper usage of the data requires prior knowledge of how the data has been packed (we used the first four bytes for storing the value of the width of the image). As a result, that method may be deemed as an “unorthodox” hack and unsuitable in team development.
In this post, we look at how you can employ the same basic idea while making the saved data more “consumable” by other developers.
Dec 12 2009
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.
Dec 04 2009
This post is a supplement to “Saving XML As Binary”. I neglected to mention in that post that you can, if so desired, embed the binary XML within your SWF instead of loading it during run-time. That means you still get to keep the XML externally, not as part of your application code, so that the code and data can still be kept separate and maintained more easily.
However, it must be mentioned that embedding a text XML within SWF will get it compressed as part of the SWF compression anyway. Therefore, if compression is the only motivation, don’t convert the XML to binary and embed the binary version – it does not make sense. But if you wish to do some data encryption, then the additional work may be appropriate.
Dec 03 2009
Whenever an application needs to save bitmap images to local storage or post them to a server script, a common practice is to encode the image as JPEG or PNG before sending that binary data off as the respective mimeType. However, if the intention is simply to save the bitmap image, ie to serialize the BitmapData, then converting the image to JPEG/PNG would actually be unnecessary.
Dec 03 2009
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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