Every year I spend two days sitting in the audience of the Flashforum conference (FFK) listening to great speakers and getting impressed by their experiments and thoughts. It’s also a good way to renew some of the basic knowledge in Flash development and of course to meet some friends in the Flash scene.
So this are most of my notes:
Flash / Flex development:
- Jessee Freemans Flash Augmented Reality Debug Tool provides an easy way to start with augmented reality development.
- Use stunning Hype-Framework effects.
- Dive into dynamic sound generation with André Michelles Audio-Sandbox.
- Have a look at the PushButton-Engine for component based development.
- Remember that Flex 4 includes a lot of performance features! It’s highly recommended to switch as soon as possible. For example the Embed-tag reduces PNG file size and lots of improvements are made within the Flex components.
- Watch the Adobe TV video preview: Flex for mobile devices
- See Christian Cantrell’s blogpost One Application , Five Screens (Including the iPad)
- Great tip: ByteArray.org – Why cacheAsBitmap is bad
-
Adobe’s Mobile Development Guide for the Flash platform (applies also to desktop applications) contains performance tips like:
-
DisplayObject.width / height
should be divisible by 2 as often as possible -
Try to avoid
Event
s and / or stop propagation as soon as possible -
Set
DisplayObject.mouseEnabled=false
if possible -
Stop
MovieClip
animations when removed from stage -
Use
TextField.opaqueBackground=true
if possible -
Use
final
statement (final class ClassName {}
) -
Use
BitmapData.get / setVector()
-
HTML / JavaScript basics:
- Use “Sprites” with HTML / CSS (load only one bitmap graphic containing all the asset images for your page and show only the particular relevant parts) and preload next page assets using AJAX while your current page is idle.
- Since usually only 2 simultaneous domain http requests are supported by browsers it’s a good practice to distribute contents from various ip addresses (use asset-servers for example).
- Load only visible parts of your site using JavaScript viewport events.
Useful workflow utils:
- Subversion Server – Hosting
- Omni Focus – Personal task management
- Planning Poker – Consensus-based estimation technique for estimating
- Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool
- IDEO Method Cards – iPhone application
- Basecamp – Get projects done
nice summary 🙂