Performance optimization for Flash Player

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, February 13, 2009 @ 7:48 am

Time and again the same scenario arises. An app is being built and it's all going fine until the very end when performance issues start to appear.

Optimizing Flash performance is certainly the most boring part of Flash Platform development but it's a cornerstone without which you, the Flex developer, can not do without.

An app is worth nothing unless you provide that effortless flow of interaction at all times.

There is not too much information on this topic as it is not the most interesting one but here are some simple guidelines that have helped me tremendously over the time, as well as a few great papers.

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ZendAMF vs. AMFPHP

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, February 6, 2009 @ 8:36 pm

So far, of all the AMF frameworks I have been a proponent of AMFPHP and RailsAMF. I still don’t know RoR very well (working on it), but I’ve been using PHP for a long time and have grown to love it so AMFPHP was always my natural choice.

Now we have a new player in Flash Remoting arena - ZendAMF. Why should anybody care when AMFPHP was just fine?

A few reasons.
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How much Excel can we get in Flex?

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, January 29, 2009 @ 7:28 pm

...and why would we go around doing that when there are perfectly good solutions out there for online spreadsheets? For instance Google Docs in which I still haven't found a bug or a feature I'm missing.

Spreadsheets are necessary because people use them because they know how to use them. It is a straight forward interface that can yield good in high complexity situations.

Now most people want to use them online. And luckily there are plenty to go around.

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Flex Camp Chicago ‘09 Community Showcase Presentation Summary

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, January 23, 2009 @ 2:43 pm

Here is some follow up information from the Flex Camp Chicago '09 Community Showcase presentation.

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Flare on PureMVC in Flex example

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, January 8, 2009 @ 4:13 pm

By this time, I am very happy and impressed with PureMVC. In combination with Flex Code Generator, plumbing downtime is minimal and more you work on a project, the more you see the benefits.

Out of all visualization frameworks for Flash Platform that I came in contact with, Flare is looking like the most customizable. I also like it's structure. At first I didn't, but now I love the fact that Visualizations are based on Sprites. I find that good for performance and transitions. You have to do a little extra work, but you will be happy with the result. All in all, I'm sold on it for now.

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Using Flex Code Generator (FCG) with Flex & PureMVC

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, December 25, 2008 @ 11:43 am

Recently I've been working on a Flex prototype using the PureMVC framework. I will talk at length another time about just how much PureMVC successfully solves a lot of problems that we encounter in interface development and especially about how much this framework is important for all those complex interactions that we expect out of our RIA interfaces.

Starting out with PureMVC is not a particularly easy task. It is a good thing that there are decent documentation and examples, at least for AS3. At first when I read the documentation, it made sense only on a high level, but translating that high level understanding to code right away was out of the question. I solved this initial sticking point by looking at a couple of AS3 examples like CafeTownsend and EmployeeAdmin, where you can see how the framework works on the right size demo app, not too big and not too small.

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Google Analytics Tracking Component for Flash Platform

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, December 11, 2008 @ 11:17 am

Although it's not too hard to set up Google Analytics tracking on Flash based web sites the traditional way by referencing JavaScript, there are still good chances for something to go wrong in the process and debugging it is notoriously hard. The good people at Google have provided the Flash Platform Developer community with a great "little" library that wraps the whole process and provides a good debugging mode.

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Pathfinder releases version 1 of its Flash Platform microsite (codename Mica)

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, December 4, 2008 @ 1:30 pm

You can see the site here. Come often as it will be updated on a regular basis.

The goal of this site is to shed more light on what is it that we do here at Pathfinder with the Flash Platform.
We would be very grateful to hear feedback about the site from any perspective.

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Bandwidth profiling Flex projects and more with Charles

Sasha Dzeletovic, Wednesday, November 19, 2008 @ 11:25 pm

Adobe Flash comes with a very useful feature for bandwidth profiling. It allows you to see how will your site/app act under certain network conditions.

Flex Builder unfortunately does not have that option so we have to look somewhere else for a solution for testing.

While there are many applications that simulate various network conditions, Charles stud up as the most practical for Flex developers, in my opinion.

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Skinning Flex with Illustrator CS3

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, November 7, 2008 @ 10:46 am

There is many ways to skin Flex applications. To name some that I've used: Flex CSS, Programmatic AS3, Flash, Degrafa, Photoshop (JPG's, GIF's and PNG's) and Illustrator.

What usually needs to happen on a project is a combination of some or all of the above. Not having a single point of reference for skinning creates quite a bottleneck.

From different approaches, two surfaced as having the best pipeline: Illustrator CS3 and Degrafa. If we are talking speed and ease of graphic design, I would now default to Illustrator CS3. For advanced skinning and interactions Degrafa holds first place.

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Defining RIA Interaction Patterns on time in Flex Agile Development

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, October 17, 2008 @ 2:19 am

Putting more attention to User Interaction Design is naturally becoming a standard practice with RIA.

With RIA technologies, classic Interaction Patterns are only building blocks, not solutions. With raised possibilities, Patterns have become more complex.

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Flash Player on iPhone gossip

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, October 3, 2008 @ 7:59 am

First thing that came to my mind when I initially heard about the iPhone was the multi-touch possibilities that would start changing the way we create Flash/Flex interfaces (hopefully through SDK extension supporting multi-touch on Adobe's side triggered by iPhone release).

It looked very promising and natural to me in the beginning that this will be the route. Flash is a great part of the Internet experience and iPhone is a great mobile device for, among other things, Internet access.

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Mouse wheel (scroll) Event in Flash Player running on a Mac

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 1:04 pm

One of the great advantages of Flash technology is cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. That is almost entirely true but a few things did slip Adobe.

A big issue that was overlooked is support for mouse wheel event on Mac OSX. A pretty basic functionality you would think. If your interface is heavily relying on mouse scrolling, your audience on Mac's will probably have a "so how does this work" blank stare.

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Flash/Flex physics engines and examples

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 10:25 am

Flash technology has gone a long way from simple vector animations. Today it has support for video and audio, 3d rendering and interaction, all kinds of advanced data visualization libraries, great components of all shapes, sizes and purposes.

What caught my eye lately is that there is a lot of 2D and 3D Physics engines being added to the list.
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Data visualization and the art of conveying information

Sasha Dzeletovic, Tuesday, September 2, 2008 @ 1:42 am

As a coder, I go over tremendous amount of information on daily basis. My case is no different than anybody's else living in the world today. Regardless of where we live and how we spend our time we are saturated with all kinds of information, a lot of it that we don't care about and a lot of it that we wish we had fast access to, if at all.

Ironically, computer technology adds to the problem more often than not. All that computational power is often just creating more data that we will never experience because there's just too much of it everywhere and all the time. Traditional techniques of consuming information are becoming too slow and narrow to handle this kind of pace.

We have all heard that a "picture speaks a thousand words". Doesn't that sound like an efficient way to consume information? Now, there are pictures and there are pictures.

There are pictures that strike a cord with you and there are pictures that leave you bland. Which one are you more likely to remember and allot the time of your mind?

Here are some libraries for data visualization in Flex/Flash as well as some artful experiments that I found to be good tools/examples of data visualization.
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