Randomize Everything

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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Today I had the chance to create my first real Internet-widget in Flash. Since this was (and still is) a new topic to me, I asked a few colleagues how they develop and share widgets. One thing popped up quite immediately: use ClearSpring!

ClearSpring is a platform you can use to manage, distribute and analyze your widgets. The cool thing about it: it’s not Flash only, you can even use it for normal html-widgets.

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Some of you will probably know the ‘as’-keyword. If not, a short explanation:

The ‘as’-keyword is used to cast an object to another one. (Well it’s not exactly ‘casting’, if someone feels like explaining the difference between casting with the ‘as’-keyword or by using the class constructor, please go ahead in the comment below!).

To make it more concrete, here is an example: Continue reading…

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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