I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep on my first night in Brighton thanx to someone putting a bottle crushing machine outside my hotel room window. Strangely, the people operating this machine felt it would be best if they only confined their bottle crushing to one hour intervals throughout the night. I’m wondering if there are people in the world who find the sound of breaking glass beneficial for sleep. All i know is i’m not one of them…
Despite this i managed to get myself up early enough to make it to the keynote, which opened with Ted Patrick and Andrew Shorten doing some kind of Sherlock Holmes parody that concerned itself with the unsolved mysteries surrounding a mythical Flex project. Andrew claimed later that this idea ‘was an a American thing’. Maybe Adobe are hoping their next slogan will be written along the lines of ‘Flex: Fun for all the Family’. I can just imagine the posters…
Some of the solved mysteries straight from the Homes & Holmes detective agency:
Problem: A Flex project has started running slowly due to an overloaded function call!
*Solution: * Use the new profiler in Flex 3 to get an overview of all processes running in the player and locate the exact method containing the heavy code.
NB. Ted revealed later that the Flex profiler is actually being used by the the Flex development team to fix bottlenecks with the Flex framework itself. More info on the profiler can be found on Adobe Labs here. The profiler presents information never really seen before about the running swf that i can see myself taking advantage of in future for Away3D optimisations.
*Problem: *A method in a class need renaming to clean up a project’s codebase!
*Solution: *Use the new Flex 3 method refactoring tool (better than a simple seach and replace) more details can be found here
*Problem: *A Client wants a Flex webpage ported to an AIR runtime!
Solution: Use the ‘new release’ option in Flex 3 that publishes final version of an application as an AIR installer.
After the detective thing lost momentum we moved on to other snippets of information. The Flash 9 update 3 has gone beta and contains, among other things, H264 support, multi-core support and hardware scaling in fullscreen mode.
Then the bit I’d been waiting for – info on the upcoming new version of the player Astro.
Some of the new planned features:
- 2.5d transformations of bitmaps (this is basically a quad tranformation similar to the old Director 7 transform methods).
- Custom filters created in hydra will run in Astro (will this be faster that current bitmapData filters?).
- New text api for textflow (columns, native right2left text, cleaner/faster glyph renderer).
Then something a little unexpected appeared – the first steps being made in the development of the new IDE for Flash cs4. This included a look at:
- Object based tweening on the timeline.
- Frame independent, transformable tweens.
- IK tween manager.
Adobe seem to be driving a lot of new directions for Flash that were always requested in the past but never followed up presumable because of the logistics and limitations of Macromedia as a company at the time. I think we can all breathe a little easier now that intentions of Adobe for Flash are coming clearer – and look to be inline with what the community wants to see.
Rob