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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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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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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This is a small SWF featuring the new uiToggleFrame component from Aspire UI Standard Edition (the component was added to the library in the recent Version 1.3 Update):

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The uiImage component is used to display non-interactive images.

The source property is a String value and determines the image source, which can be an external image file (property value specifies the file name) or an image embedded in the SWF (property value specifies the class name).

This means that the image source has to be expressed as a String value, which is not always possible. For example, a Bitmap could be dynamically generated during run-time and you may wish to (re)use its BitmapData as the source in uiImage instances.

As of Aspire UI Version 1.3, the uiImage class has a static registerBitmapData() method. You may use this method to register a BitmapData object in the image cache, giving it a unique id. Subsequently, you will be able to use the id as the image source for uiImage instances.

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The “background” property defined by the com.ghostwire.ui.core.uiComponent class determines the style of the background for a component instance – color, opacity, border color, border width, gradient fills, and corner radius.

By default, no background will be drawn. The following is an example on how to draw a simple background:

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