Feb 27 2010
[Developer Showcase] ActiveCaptain – The Interactive Cruising Guidebook
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.
ActiveCaptain
The application allows boaters to share their knowledge and experience. Registered members can provide information about fuel pricing, slip fees, a favorite anchorage, or some local knowledge, as well as read marina reviews written by other Captains, write reviews, add points of interest, or correct inaccurate information.
Let’s take a look at some screen shots of the application:
pressing and holding down the mouse on the map brings up a contextual popup menu
a resizable modal dialog with some common UI controls
searching for marinas
Testimonial
The following is what the developers at ActiveCaptain have to say about the Aspire UI Components toolkit:
At ActiveCaptain (www.activecaptain.com) we started re-writing our Interactive Cruising Guidebook over a year ago. Early on, we decided that there was only one integrated UI toolkit for ActionScript 3 that had enough capability and quality – and that was the Aspire UI Components. We loved the way it looked and the consistent way of accessing them made coding easy to learn.
Although we started out with simple user-interface needs, it quickly grew to complex scrolling lists with custom multi-line list items, edit-in-place dialogs, tabbed-cards with user-interfaces, and many forms to display.
We’re exceedingly happy with the results. There are no coding workarounds or funny kludgy things needed to make it all work. It’s all consistent and clean and works very, very well.
All Flash apps would benefit from the Aspire UI Components toolkit.
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. You may experiment with the various features by downloading the trial version.
cool post… cheers