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
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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In times of crisis there is little few work than other busy-o-noo-we-have-to-reach-our-deadline-developer-days.
So, there are a few useful things we can do: invest our time into new technologies or play with things (with the technology we daily use) we didn’t play with before. Mostly because we didn’t have enough time back then. The second most useful thing we can do is getting a certificate for the technologies we use every day.
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From time to time some of us still have to code in oldskool ActionScript 2. A few days ago a colleague asked me for a function for trimming ‘new line’ (\n), ‘carriage return’ (\r) characters, spaces, …
So I ended up searching my archives for a code snippet to archive this functionality and look what I found:
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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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