Avalonia Controls v25.1 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Thursday, November 7, 2024 at 6:46pm

This massive release contains our new Bars product with modern ribbon, toolbar, menu and related control implementations that allow you to replicate Office-like user interfaces, right in your Avalonia applications.  Numerous enhancements were made to add support for template-based icons in our controls.  And finally, the Actipro native control themes were updated to be compatible with Avalonia v11.2.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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Here’s a look at some of the new features.

Ribbons, ToolBars, Menus

Ribbon Variant Sizing

Ribbon consolidates all commands into a single location, which is easy to use and scales well, thereby providing fast access to all commands regardless of window size. The entire layout of child controls can be tailored to ensure the most important commands are prominently available. Through the use of variant layout phases, you can achieve nearly any dynamic layout that you find in Office.

Ribbon Classic and Simplified Layout Modes

Classic layout mode uses a taller ribbon with a combination of large buttons and multi-row groups of controls and is ideal for large applications with lots of commands. Whereas Simplified layout mode is a modern refinement that uses a single row of controls and supports overflow. Ribbon can instantly toggle between the two modes.

Color Galleries

Show color palettes using the many available gallery display options. Colors can be categorized, and color shades can be generated.

Other Galleries

Galleries can appear on ribbons or menus, and can custom render items to show anything from bullets or symbols to text styles.

Screen Tips

Screen tips are advanced tool tips with a standardized layout for bar controls, and intelligently display below the ribbon.

Key Tips

Key tips provide easy keyboard access to any control on the ribbon or in its popups, even on backstage.

Backstage

The ribbon File button's backstage consists of application-wide commands such as for file operations and other functionality like printing.

UI Density

The user interface can switch between compact (seen here), normal, and spacious densities. Spacious densities are more touch friendly.

Standalone Toolbars

A standalone toolbar control is flexible enough to be used in several contexts and can host any of the galleries or controls that are used in a ribbon. Overflowed controls display in a popup.

Complete MVVM Support

Optionally create the entire ribbon user interface via MVVM. An open-source companion MVVM library is available that provides a full set of view models and related UI bindings for all bar controls.

Icon Updates

Avalonia has several icon libraries available where the icons are implemented via an Object and IDataTemplate pair instead of via a single IImage. Using these sorts of icons in our Avalonia controls in the past was difficult due to some of our icon properties being declared as IImage.

We’ve added a new IconPresenter control that is now used in control templates throughout our products.  IconPresenter supports Object-based icon data and an IDataTemplate that can render that icon data.  This mechanism is customizable so that it can work with any third-party icon library.  All our controls have been updated to support these kinds of icons, while still supporting IImage-based icons out of the box.

Avalonia v11.2 Compatibility

The recent Avalonia 11.2 version made several breaking changes to their native control templates.  The free Actipro Themes for native Avalonia controls have been updated to adapt and be fully compatible with those changes.

Avalonia UI Controls v24.2 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, July 23, 2024 at 8:13pm

This version upgrades all the Actipro controls and themes to target the recently-released Avalonia 11.1 version.

An example of using the recently-added Actipro Settings controls

For customers who wish to continue targeting their applications with Avalonia v11.0 for now, please use the Actipro Avalonia UI Controls 24.1 version, as that targets Avalonia v11.0.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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Avalonia UI Controls v24.1.1 Maintenance Release

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Monday, July 22, 2024 at 5:53pm

A new Avalonia UI Controls release is now available that makes some minor updates to the 24.1 version of our controls, which targets Avalonia v11.0. 

With today's release of Avalonia v11.1, a new 24.2 version will be published soon that targets Avalonia v11.1.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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Avalonia UI Controls v24.1 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, May 7, 2024 at 1:12pm

This version adds several great new controls and makes many updates across the Avalonia UI control product line.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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Here’s a look at some of the new features.

Fundamentals

Settings

Settings groups, expanders, and cards used for application settings UI

Most applications contain a window or view where end users can configure settings. Actipro now provides several controls for displaying grouped and optionally expandable card-based editors for settings that are presented in a consistent, easy-to-use way.

  • Consistent Appearance - Cards have a uniform design, and related cards can be grouped together. Each setting card can optionally have an icon, header, description, and content.
  • Card Contents - A setting card's content is generally an editor for the setting. The content may be left blank, and the card itself can be made into a clickable button.
  • Flexible Editors - Each setting card can contain any kind of editor control. Switches, sliders, combo boxes, and text boxes are commonly-used editor controls.
  • Expandable Sections - Some settings have numerous child settings. These indented settings may be hidden under expandable cards that animate the contents when opened.

Application settings have never looked so good!

Card

The new card control presents visually grouped information for a single subject, using optional cover, thumbnail, header, and footer sections.

A profile card with multiple sections

Cards can optionally be actionable as well.

Segmented Bar

The new segmented bar control allows a user to select a single item with support for fluent animations when changing selection.

Several theme variants

It can arrange items horizontally or vertically.

Info Bar

The new info bar control displays essential information to a user without disrupting the user flow.

Various kinds of info bar severities

Messages can display with optional severity, action, and more.

Circular Progressbar

The new circular progressbar control displays a ranged progress value using fluent animations. It is similar to a native linear progressbar, except that it renders the progress in a ring shape and shows the progress text within the ring.

Circular progressbars can be an integral part of a dashboard display

An indeterminate state is supported for scenarios where no specific progress value can yet be determined.

Shared Library

Scrollable Overflow Presenter

The new scrollable overflow presenter control can be oriented horizontally or vertically and displays scroll buttons when its content overflows the available space.

A horizontal scrollable overflow presenter with overflow button displayed

Clicking a scroll button smoothly scrolls the content.

Themes

Toggle Switch Affinity

Toggle switches can now optionally arrange the knob/track on the right side of the control instead of the left, which is ideal when used in the new settings-related controls.

Avalonia

The minimum Avalonia UI dependency is updated from v11.0.5 to v11.0.7 and all native control themes should now be consistent with Avalonia UI’s theme updates through v11.0.10.

Avalonia UI Controls v23.1.3 Maintenance Release

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Wednesday, February 7, 2024 at 4:56pm

A new Avalonia UI Controls release is now available the adds several great new controls.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

Download Buy Now

Fundamentals

Avatar

Avatar controls are used to represent people or objects. They can render a full-size image, a centered glyph, a person's initials, or text.

Empty, initials, and image avatars

When text is provided, initials can automatically be derived. Large text-based content will scale down to try and fit within the circle as needed. A generic "empty" glyph will be displayed when no avatar content is provided.

Solid and soft appearances, showing how different initials derive various color combinations

An avatar is most distinctive when using image-based content, so text-based content can be harder to differentiate. While an avatar's foreground and background can be manually specified, there is built-in logic to automatically select color combinations based on the avatar's content and using either a solid or soft appearance.

Avatar derives from Button and supports the standard button command model and click events.

AvatarGroup

Use an AvatarGroup to render multiple Avatar controls. Avatars in a group can overlap with each other by a given size percentage, and you can expand the avatars on mouse hover. When the avatars don't fit in the available space, they can overflow to a popup.

An avatar group with an overflow button that when clicked, shows overflowed avatars

Wrap the group in a chromeless button to make an actionable avatar group that executes a task when clicked.

Badge

Badges can add contextual information to target elements, or even used on their own. Badges can display small content like text, counts, icons, or can render as a dot.

Various kinds of badges

When a badge adorns an element, it shows and hides using an animated "pop" effect. It can be easily aligned to any anchor position on the target element.

NumericBadge

NumericBadge inherits Badge and supports binding to a numeric value, such as a count value. The badge automatically displays when the count increments to a positive number and hides when decrementing to zero.

Badge and NumericBadge adorning elements

The displayed numeric value has overflow support, meaning that a large value can be restricted to only show "99+" for example.

RingSpinner

The RingSpinner control renders an animated ring where the two ring segment ends chase each other around the circle.

A couple RingSpinner controls

It is used when some form of processing is occurring to tell the end user that something is happening.

Shared Library

RingSlice

The RingSlice shape renders a portion (or the entire circle) of a ring shape. Its start/end angles, radius, thickness, and other stroke properties can be set.

A circular progress bar

Ring slice shapes can be combined in many interesting ways within UI, primarily used to create progress indicators.