3. about me
• Weyert de Boer
• Flash Designer / Developer at Nothing
• Co-Author of books about Flash Lite
and AIR
• Flash Lite developer since Late 2004
• Worked on Flash-based UI for Motorola,
13. The future of flash mobile
October 2009 Flash Player 10.1 was
announced the first full-blown flash
player for mobile devices
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14. The future of flash mobile
Browser Plugins Current 2010
Desktop class Flash Player 10.1
Flash Player 10.1
High-end class
(smartphones)
Flash Lite 3.1
Flash Enabled
Low-end class
(source: Mark Doherty, Adobe)
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15. The future of flash mobile
What’s new in Flash Player 10.1?
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16. The future of flash mobile
ActionScript 3
Multitouch
Screen orientation
Geolocation
Accelerometers
Native text input
Memory and cpu performance improvements
Support for Palm Pre, Blackberry, Apple , Android,
Windows Mobile, Symbian
Hardware based rendering and video decoding
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17. The future of flash mobile
AIR and mobile, what about that?
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18. The future of flash mobile
Flash for the iPhone leverages AIR
technology for the building process
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19. The future of flash mobile
Final result of the Flash for iPhone
solution is an application bundle file
which can easily be installed on the
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20. The future of flash mobile
Similar solutions in the future for other
mobile platforms like Android, Symbian
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21. The future of flash mobile
Contextual applications the new hot
thing, same content on different devices
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25. Monetizing and redistribution
Easiest way to earn money with
mobile flash content is by
collaborating in contests or get a
grant via the Open Screen Project
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don’t hide elements or set the alpha to zero but actual remove them from the stage so that they wont be taken into account during the compositing/drawing cycle of the flash player
keep your displaylist or clips flat avoid deep nested clips to avoid performance penalties -- also only show elements or load data when it’s actually necessary can help
you can use external assets to increase performance or memory usage
the more colours the more bits so more memory will be used by the player same for compressed pictures or using transparencies
the use of vectors take up cpu power because of the math which requires the player do more work then instead of using bitmaps (no calculations for each curve etc.)
the use of transparant pictures of clips makes it harded for the player to be smart and only redraw parts which are changing. because transparent have to be merged or composited with the clips behind it. especially, use as much opaque or solid bitmaps as possible
gotoAndPlay() requires the player to render or load all assets on each frame so if you want to jump to frame 5 the frames 1-4 have been loaded and drawn already.
similar to tip #6 fonts are embedded in the flash movie got converted to vector shapes which takes more time as discussed in tip #6
if you use images and then scale them down or you might be better off to make the image straight away in the right size to avoid unnecessary transformations by the flash player meaning it has to do less heavy lifting
the use of tweens requires the elements on the frames to be interpolated in between the keyframes which takes up cpu usage better to use keyframes instead easier for the flash player
the desktop computer will always be better performing then the actual target device -- don’t forget to test on the device itself. of course, using the performance test swf file from device central and make your own custom device profile can make life easier but it’s not the real deal.