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Quicktip #6: Fixing the cut off character on embedded-font-textfields

As we all know, Flash has these crazy bugs nobody ever understands. One of those is the fact that the last character of a dynamic textfield (which has been set to “AutoSize”) gets cut off when you’re using an embedded font. Up till now I still don’t understand what kind of situation leads to this exceptional behavior. The only thing I can say is that Flash Player fails to determine the correct text length which screws up the textfield width to be shorter than it has to be.

Example:

Blurred/Cut Off Characters

Blurred/Cut Off Characters


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Quicktip #5: int is faster than uint

The past few weeks I’ve been programming a scheduling component in Flash which has to be extremely performant. Every small adaption in my code that could help with limiting the processing needs is a good adaption. Today I stumbled upon a post of Grant Skinner in which he explains that using a uint is slower than a normal int. The uint’s can get five times slower than using a normal int.

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Some ActionScript optimization tricks and good practises

The last few months I have been busy integrating Flash swf files into bigger (mostly Flex) projects. Because Flex websites might hog the memory due to large amounts of graphical elements and sometimes enormous huge amount of dynamic content, I had to keep an eye out for performance drops.

There have been a lot of optimization tricks for ActionScript 3, mine listed here will probably already be somewhere on one or another guru’s blog. But I’d like to list them again because I think there is a need to educate beginning (and sometimes advanced) ActionScript developers about the different performance capabilities. Please mind that this is NOT a complete list in any way. These optimizations are the ones I had to use the most lately.

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