Dec 12 2009
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.
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):
Sep 04 2009
A modal window is a window that must be dismissed before interaction with the other parts of the application can be resumed. This is usually used to draw attention to a certain task at hand.
The uiDialog class helps to display simple modal windows. There are three types of built-in dialogs you can call up using the show() method of the class.
Aug 28 2009
A uiWindow container has a title bar that contains a close button if the instance has been set to be closeable by end-users. If closing the window would in turn produce any result that the end-user may regret, for example if closing the window is equivalent to aborting an ongoing task, or data collected from the end-user would be lost, then it is often appropriate to ask the end-user to confirm if he would like to close the window. This is usually done by showing a modal dialog asking the end-user to confirm the action.
Aug 12 2009
When using the Aspire UI library, each component instance will attempt to compute its own “ideal” preferred size if its size is not explicitly set. This “ideal” size typically means the minimum size at which the component may render itself fully (or sufficiently without appearing distorted), taking into account its child display objects such as labels or embedded images, if any.
To be very clear, for any Aspire UI component, if width and height is explicitly set, then this explicit size becomes the preferred size. This means that if you set the size of a component instance explicitly, you are overriding what the component deems to be ideal.
Aug 07 2009
The uiWindow container does not automatically embed any scroll pane since this is not always required by its content. For example, the window may be set to be non-resizable and is big enough to show all the content. Or you may decide that the content should be scaled/resized to fit the viewable area.
If scrollable content is required, you may implement it using the uiScrollPane class – create a uiScrollPane instance and add it to the content of the uiWindow instance. You would then add child display objects to the content of the uiScrollPane instance, instead of the content of the uiWindow container itself.
The fillX and fillY properties of the uiScrollPane instance should be set to true to enable automatic resizing when the uiWindow container is resized.
Apr 27 2009
What are modal windows?
In user interface design, a modal window is one that commands the end-user’s immediate attention – the user must interact with the window and/or close it before he may return to the main application.
When using the Aspire UI library, a modal window is created by including WINDOW.IS_MODAL in the “mode” parameter of the uiWindow constructor:
Apr 10 2009
The following SWF features the uiDialog component from Aspire UI Standard Edition:
Apr 09 2009
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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