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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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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