Mar 27 2010
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.
Dec 14 2009
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:
Dec 03 2009
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):
Dec 02 2009
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):
Nov 04 2009
The Aspire UI library, for pure ActionScript 3 development, has been updated to version 1.3 (changelog).
Among the many improvements, the most important is implementing support for the use of packaged themes. The Aspire UI library uses external PNG images for component skinning, which means that skin assets can be easily modified by theme designers using any image editor (capable of exporting to the PNG format).
With the Aspire UI Version 1.3 Update, the skinning work flow has been further enhanced by allowing developers to optionally use packaged themes.
It is now possible to compress skin assets from a theme folder, along with the “rules.xml” file, into one single binary file.
Aug 24 2009
The Aspire UI library uses bitmap PNG image files for component skinning. This means that the component skins can be easily edited/replaced by using any graphics editing software capable of saving in PNG format.
When using Adobe Fireworks, it is important to remember that the raw file format used by the software is PNG. When you save a Fireworks document, you create/overwrite a PNG file and this resulting file will contain author-time editing settings such as guide lines, layers, paths, symbols, etc. This file is many times bigger than what the actual image itself should be if only the image data is saved, and is unlikely to be what you would want distributed/deployed with your Flash application.
Instead of saving the Fireworks document, use the “Image Preview…” command (CTRL+SHIFT+X) to bring up the Image Preview dialog, then choose “PNG 8″, “PNG 24″ or “PNG 32″ (8, 24, 32 bits) from the Format options. Export from this dialog to get the flattened PNG image file. Once you have chosen the Format from this dialog (and dismissed the dialog by clicking Export or OK), you can subsequently call the “Export…” command (CTRL+SHIFT+R), and the last chosen image file format (and other Export settings) will be used.
Aug 20 2009
The uiToolTips manager implements the use of pop-up tool tips. The contents of these tool tips are placed inside an instance of the uiFrame container class. Since uiFrame containers are skinnable, this basically means that tool tips are also skinnable, albeit indirectly.
Aug 17 2009
The uiFrame container is used when you want to draw a background or border behind a single child display object. The background/border is rendered using skinning, ie determined by the value of the “skin” property.
Aug 14 2009
This demo is the same as that in the previous post uiBTabView Example Using “xp” Theme, but we are using a different theme this time:
Apr 21 2009
A new theme has been added to the Aspire UI library. Below is a screen shot of the theme in use:
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