Mar 30 2010
uiColorPicker: Customizing The Colors Palette
In this post, we look at how the colors palette/swatch of the uiColorPicker control can be customized.
Mar 27 2010
uiColorPicker: Adding Drop Shadow To Popup Palette
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.
Mar 26 2010
Aspire UI Components Update v1.4
The Aspire UI Components toolkit has been updated to version 1.4 (changelog).
Mar 13 2010
Aspire UI Components (Flash ActionScript 3.0) Site License
We have added a new licensing option for the Aspire UI Components (Flash ActionScript 3.0) toolkit. For teams with more than 15 developers, this option translates to significant savings.
Feb 27 2010
[Developer Showcase] ActiveCaptain – The Interactive Cruising Guidebook
The developers at ActiveCaptain have been using the Aspire UI Components toolkit for over a year now. In this article, we take a quick look at their latest Flash web application, an interactive cruising guide.
Jan 04 2010
Using AspireUI Components with MDM Zinc 3.0
MDM Zinc™ 3.0 is a feature-rich Rapid Application Development Tool for turning SWFs into stunning commercial cross-platform desktop applications, screensavers, widgets, CD roms, DVD’s, kiosks and more. The AspireUI AS3 library uses PNG image files for component skinning, and this ease of skinning is a good fit for Zinc™ 3.0 projects, especially if you would like to create applications that look like native desktop applications. The toolkit currently comes with four component themes – “classic”, “xp”, “vista” and “graylic”. The first three aforementioned themes are Windows OS lookalike themes.
In this short tutorial, we will look at how you can use the AspireUI library in Zinc™ 3.0 projects, and how you can easily swap component themes by simply changing one line of code.
Dec 17 2009
Small Caps Fonts
In typography, “small caps” refer to uppercase (capital) characters used in-lieu of lowercase (small) characters, where these uppercase characters are set at the same height as the lowercase characters.
Small caps are typically used for titles, headlines, column headings, etc. They are also good for any text that you would usually use all capitals. This is because the use of small caps makes the run of capital letters seem less jarring, and would also often require less space than all caps.
While many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in small caps (which leaves uppercase letters as they are but converts lowercase letters to small caps), this is a feature that is lacking in most graphics editing software.
Some fonts have inherent small caps, ie they use smaller capital letters in place of the lowercase characters. These fonts are useful when you wish to use small caps to bring distinction to your designs.
Here are some fonts with inherent small caps:
Dec 16 2009
{mdm} 25% Holiday Sale On Zinc 3.0
If you are looking to compile SWFs into cross-platform desktop applications, leveraging powerful desktop-only APIs, you may want to consider MDM Zinc 3.0. Available for Windows & Mac OSX, Zinc™ 3.0 is the fastest, most powerful and most feature-rich Rapid Application Development Tool for Adobe® Flash® and Flex®. With Zinc 3.0, you can rapidly create stunning commercial Applications, Screensavers, Widgets, CD Roms, DVD’s, Kiosks and More.
Dec 14 2009
Aspire UI Components Trial Version Updated
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+.
Dec 14 2009
Aspire UI Components: Size of “classic”, “graylic”, “vista” and “xp” Themes
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:
