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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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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