As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently got back from WebDU in Sydney (pronounced seeeeyyed ` kneee in the local tongue). One of the best Flex related presentations was related to the startup cycle of flex apps. The Big Bang theory relates here.
Delivering the presentation Michael Labriola took what could have been quite a painfully subject and managed to keep it interesting and extremely informative relating it to situations that we often encounter during Flex development. So if you get the chance to see him present this topic (and as a side note get told off for all your bad coding habits) definitely take the opportunity as I suspect you will learn a lot of the little secrets which help form our flex apps. Slides below but really see it in person if you can
Geoff from Daemon, Minty from Nectarine and Kai from Ventego Creative have created WebDU’s very own trading card game. The cards look great and you can tell they have had the magic wand of Nectarine cast over them, and the combined word smithing of Kai and Geoff to make you giggle.
OFFICAL:
“All you have to do is submit a hand of our incredibly collectable trading cards to the friendly conference staff, and if it’s one of the highest scoring hands, you could be in for a share of the goodies.”
So theres prizes to win and cards to trade/pilfer. Anyone else from NZ heading to WebDU? Ping me if you are and we should head out in force to one of the many social events
Can’t wait to see them in real life? you can check out a preview HERE
But watch the fine print. Even at low resolution I can make out some fairly strange topics covered in the rules which will lead to all sorts of shenanigans at the conference.
Great work guys…. and Minty how do I get a cartoon of me? they rock so much.
Today Adobe announced the public pre-release version of the Flash Player 10. Improvements include:
- Creative Expression
- Custom Filters and Effects
- 3D Effects
- New Text Engine
- Text Layout Components
- Drawing API Enhancements
- Color Management
- Visual Performance Improvements
- GPU Compositing
- GPU Blitting
- Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1)
- Vector Data Type
- Rich Media
- Dynamic Streaming
- RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol)
- Speex Audio Codec
- Other Community Requested Enhancements
- File Reference
- Dynamic Sound Generation
- Large Bitmap Support
- Context Menu
- GB18030 Compliance
- Ubuntu OS Support
My big interests lie in the performance areas, as I am starting to hit a lot of the barriers of the Flash player as customers demand more and more from the Flex applications we make (hoping to show a big one soon – which will explain my lack of blog posts recently).
Also of note was the mention of the possibility of peer to peer UDP communication. I haven’t dug into this one much but if so WOW!
Finally as pointer to the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” ideal the guys involved in the “Adobe, make some noise” campaign finally have something to make some noise about.
Today I was getting close to launch of an application I have been working on and decided to a bit more Profiling on to clean the performance again (its running on the end of the Flash players VM capabilities). The problem sprang from the fact I had recently changed the compiler options to us Flex 3’s new Runtime Shared Libraries (RSL’s) of the framework to improve caching performance. But to my surprise I was greeted with a lovely error message:
“profiling can only be done on the debug version of an application.”
WTF? Right click the flash player instance in the browser… yep its the latest player DEBUG version. I run up the standard “Test” project I always have to test different things as I develop. Yep profiling runs fine on that too.
The problem springs from the fact that I had changed the Flex app to use the RSL compiled framework, which when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The RSL version of the library is compiled without the debug code so as to provide the smallest file possible.
To resolve it’s necessary to indicate “Merged into code” in Project > Properties > Flex Builder Path > Library Path > Framework linkage.
So just keep an eye out for this one. Is anyone out there using RSLs yet? or the profiler?
