Very commonly, computer programs (usually games) that have the need to simulate a shuffling of a deck of cards (or drawing a tile from a bag, etc.) will go the obvious way of putting the items in an array, and then randomize the order of the elements of the array. A common algorithm for doing that is the Fisher–Yates shuffle (you can find a suitable implementation easily by googling).

The purpose of this post, however, is not to discuss “how” to shuffle arrays. Rather, I would like to bring up the question of “why” (do it) in the first place.

Continue Reading »

This is quite an obscure, little known, hidden-by-default feature, but the FlashDevelop IDE actually has a built-in Flash tracer. The plug-in is unfortunately not enabled by default, and new users of FlashDevelop often get frustrated wondering where to look for the output of their trace statements.

To get the tracer to work:

1) Go to Tools -> Program Settings (F10).

2) In the Plugins list on the left of the dialog box, look for FlashLogViewer and click on it.

3) On the right panel, look for the “Start Tracking” property, click on the drop down box and select “OnBuildComplete” (it is set to “Manually” by default).

The output of your trace statements are now shown in the Output Panel after you build your project.

The uiImage component is used to display an image (JPG/PNG/GIF). The path to the image is specified by the source property. By default, the uiImage object will attempt to load resources from the “assets/images/” folder (path is relative to the application SWF). To load from a different path, for example the folder “resources/images/”, prefix the source with “url:”, example “url:resources/images/garden.jpg”.

In order to load images from a different domain, the Flash Player will need to read a crossdomain.xml file from the foreign domain (and this file must grant permission to your domain to access the required resources). Typically, you would expect to need to specify a checkPolicyFile property somewhere. In the case of the uiImage component, there is no checkPolicyFile property to set because this would be unnecessary.

Continue Reading »

It is often overlooked, but the uiFrame component in the Aspire UI toolkit essentially has the same utility as the GroupBox in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

A GroupBox displays a border/frame around a group of controls, with or without a caption/title. This is typically done to provide visual feedback to end-users that a collection of controls on a form is logically grouped.

When using the Aspire UI toolkit in ActionScript 3.0 projects, you can use the uiFrame component for the same results.

Continue Reading »

In this post, we look at how the colors palette/swatch of the uiColorPicker control can be customized.

Continue Reading »

The uiColorPicker control displays a single rectangular button that brings up a palette of pre-defined set of colors (also known as a color swatch). By default, this popup does not cast a drop shadow, as shown in the screenshot below:

In this post, we look at how to get the popup to cast a drop shadow, by simply adding some directives in the “rules.xml” of the theme you are using.

Continue Reading »

The Aspire UI Components toolkit has been updated to version 1.4 (changelog).

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »