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 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 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.

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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.

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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:

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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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One of the key features of the Aspire UI library is the ease of skinning which is done via external PNG images. These images are loaded during run-time instead of being compiled into the application SWF. Not only does it make it easy to (re)design component skins, it also makes it easy to try out different themes. As long as a theme is designed and developed correctly, an application can switch themes easily.

The following is the exact same SWF shown in the previous uiWindow Example, but this time it is rendered using the “classic” theme (included in the Aspire UI distribution):

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