Not long ago, I introduced Foxhole for Starling, a library of user interface components built on the Starling Framework. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working hard on Foxhole, and a ton of progress has been made on all fronts. Let’s look at a few noteworthy details.

First of all, if you’re just checking out Foxhole for the first time, or if you haven’t checked in on Foxhole’s progress in a while, take a look at Foxhole’s List of Features to see what you can do with the components right now. I think you’ll find that Foxhole is a pretty powerful library for building UI in apps and games using the awesome hardware acceleration available in recent versions of the Flash runtimes. Foxhole is light, extensible, and especially great for mobile. If you have experience with Adobe Flex or with Flash Pro’s AS3 components, you’ll feel right at home with Foxhole.

Daniel recently released Starling 1.2, and that means that Foxhole can start taking advantage of the new features in that version. I always try to keep Foxhole compatible with the current official release of Starling, and I’ve been anticipating some great updates in Foxhole’s internals to improve performance with Starling 1.2’s updates. Along with those enhancements, I also added support for custom text renderers. Previous versions of Foxhole supported bitmap fonts only, but now you can use a new renderer called TextFieldTextRenderer that creates a texture from a TextField to support embedded and device fonts in Foxhole components. You can even create your own custom text renderer, so the Text Layout Framework or something else based on Flash Text Engine could be used with Foxhole too.

I’ve been adding more and more tutorials to the Foxhole Wiki whenever I get a chance. Check out the updated Getting Started with Foxhole tutorial which now follows along with the source code for the Foxhole HelloWorld example. The ScreenNavigator component is an essential part of navigating between menus/screens in a mobile app or game, and its “How To” tutorial covers all of the important features. Finally, a detailed article explains the lifecycle and architecture of custom Foxhole components. More tutorials and articles to come.

Because Foxhole has been gaining so much interest, Daniel added a new Foxhole Sub-Forum over at the official Starling forums. If you ever need any help with the components, I visit the forums many times a day, and I will be happy to answer any questions that you have. A number of Starling users are becoming very experienced with Foxhole too. I look forward to meeting more of the community there. Come join us. There’s a lot of excitement brewing around Starling and Foxhole. It’s a breath of fresh air, for sure.

Very exciting things are on the horizon for Foxhole. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you soon.