Posts Tagged components

A few days ago our good friends at Forum Nokia released a basic set of components for Flash Lite 2.0 beginners.  They have included documentation and sample assets so that a user might change the look and feel for their own UI.  The memory requirements for the examples that I tried appear high for this level of functionality, but its a good start and they come with documentation.  Scott reminded me that Jesse Warden released a good component set for mobile devices some time ago called Shuriken, they are definately worth checking out.

With this is mind I dug around to find some other components that we have sitting around.  Happily our own Matt Snow from our Experience Design team was able to provide a set of Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.0 UI example components.  You can find them over in the example section, though as you might expect they are a little rough round the edges.

What will you get from them:

• Discover how to create low memory yet rich components
• List, Slider, Tile, NavModel and Gapper components for Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
• Carousel, Menu, Story and scroll bars in Flash Lite 1.1
• Key Handling for Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
• Image Handling, loading and unloading etc (TileMenu)
• Creating device UI and multi-screen applications (NavModel)

Unfortunately I don’t have time to polish these for installation and add documentation.  The majority of the components are extremely simple and not compiled so that you can freely edit them whilst retaining the size and memory benefits.  You can consider them free to use or change in your projects.

Future Thoughts

In time it would be great if these could be absorbed into a community effort to create components for mobile devices.  For that, I do have another set of mobile components and a mobile framework to hand that are more complex but unsupported.

Although extremely well documented and stable, the memory requirements from 1 year+ ago were such that it’s gathering dust.  We are now starting to see devices with the right levels of RAM (2mb+) and so it might be time to give it a go.

The following graphic is a basic RSS reader built in about 10 mins!

My question to you is:  If I was to hand these over, would you be willing to package, support and maintain them for everyone?