All I have to say is … enh.

There was a lot of hype when gLIC was announced. It took a LONG time for it to get released, however it was explained as business matters rather than any issues with the components. This was confirmed by the announcement that gLIC was to be distributed by Metalliq and branded as mCOM.

Well, it’s finally been released. Here is the demo page:
http://www.metaliq.com/mcom/

Perhaps it’s just the online demo that has issues, but my first impressions are:
- looks good
- seems quick
- has inconsistent event behaviours
- some items do not work as one would expect a UI element to work

Also, the online demo has a nice range of options to play with, only there are no labels for textfields, so no way to know what you’re supposed to be entering.

The skins look great. The scrolling seems fast and the dropdowns and other UI elements respond well.

However, the scrolling is just wrong. A combobox should scroll line by line, or at the very least, once you pick an item, that item should appear completely when you open the dropdown again. If you scroll so an item is only partly in view and select it, then select the dropdown again, the selected item hasn’t moved, so you still only see part of the item. That is not good UI.

The scrollbar seems to have another “glitch”. If you look at the combobox or scrollbar example you’ll see that you get the scroll events when you select the scroll handle and move up … even when the handle can no longer move. This is wrong, since the content is no longer scrolling and the event means nothing. That means code is executing for no reason.

If you look at the combobox demo you can see itemRollOver and itemRollOut events as you hover over/out of items in the dropdown. However, if you go to the Datagrid demo, you receive no such events. The Datagrid also doesn’t fire off scroll events. Perhaps this is just someone forgetting to pass events to the textarea, but who knows?

The colour pickers - that’s right there are 2 - are pretty cool. One is the RGB grid you see in the Flash IDE. The other is an RGB selector where you use a slider for each colour. The cool part is that when you change one slider the other two sliders change colours to reflect their affected ranges. Very nice. The only trouble I’ve seen is with the second selector, where if you open the selector box, click the Stage, the selector goes away, but a focusRect is left behind until you change focus to another UI item. If you press Enter the problem doesn’t appear. This leads me to believe there is an issue with focus - oh, great.

I tried the demo with both Flash player 7.0.19.0 and 8.0.5.0 on my PC and there is no difference. I assume the demo was published for fp6 or 7, but it’s not mentioned anywhere on the page.

I’m actually very surprised that these issues exist. It is my understanding that the components were ready and booted around during Grant’s original development, testing, and usage, and the components underwent a beta period. It wasn’t an extremely long beta period, but I’m surprised anything so obvious got through.

There is potentially another side to this of course: it is possible that there are in fact options to enable certain types of behaviour and the demo was created with those behaviours in the state you see now. Perhaps the demo was just not tested by anyone outside of the company and so the behaviours don’t seem so odd to them.

Anyhow, check them out and see what you think. Post comments if you find anything contradictory to my findings or if you find anything else.