When I first saw – years ago – a pic of this concept car, I thought yeah, that may be the right direction, intelligent design with a subtle retro touch (just linking to its successful history, I’d say). But they’ve never actually built it. And I wonder why..

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I’m close to finishing a new project. Well, it’s actually not that new of a project, but it hasn’t gone online so far, and when I did the first version back in March I’ve used Papervision to achieve the goals. It’s basically a simple CoverFlow effect to scroll through Logos.

The thing with the old Papervision version was.. it got pretty slow when loading many pictures (resulting in many 3d objects). I got briefed with a screen design more or less and expected much less elements to be loaded. Now they got back to me saying they had some problems. Oh yes, they had. Boy was it slow!!

So I did a new version, skipping Papervision for the new Flash Player 10 capabilities. Wow! What an improvement not only in speed, but also in quality (because I wouldn’t have to switch to crispy bitmap handling for acceptable speed – and Flash doesn’t provide that feature anyway) and file size (less than 25%!). Now I just hope that the end client will have the nuts to go with Flash Player 10 :-) (Adobe still doesn’t provide any statistics, but it’s not that wide spread yet as for now).

See here the result (still in development – click the picture). You’ll need Flash Player 10 (I don’t check for the version in this example):

I made use of SimpleZSorter

Update: Well, the client wouldn’t go with 10. So I had to recode the Papervision version to speed it up as much as possible, and I think it got pretty speedy after all. See here for comparison.

Most of the Flash application deal with server side data like images, xml files etc. We tend to forget about that because the default Run or Debug commands in Flex will open a local html file (and also because we developers often have quite a nice internet connection when testing remotely). Thus all data is loaded nearly instantely.

In Flash we have a menu command called «Simulate Download» to see how things run at different bandwidth situations. But how to achieve this in Flex?

I’ve been using Sloppy for a long time. It’s little java app that can be started via a simple web click. It’s really easy to use and does very well what it does. For debugging your app (your flash website) throttled in Flex Builder simply follow these steps:

1. Open the Sloppy website
2. Click the little Sloppy icon:
   
   
3. A «sloppy.jnlp» file is downloaded. Open it if doesn’t open automatically.
4. The actual application will be downloaded and started. If it asks you to trust: trust! :-)
5. Enter the address of your html file in the bin-debug or bin-release folder. It should be a webserver address. I usually create a symbolic link of my project directory and put it into my local webserver directory.
   
6. Click «Go» – this will start the Sloppy proxy and open the page in your default browser. 
7. Copy the address from the browser window (usually http://127.0.0.1:7569/your/path)
   
8. You may close the window. Go to Flex Builder and open the project properties (right click on project folder, last item). In an Actionscript Project, switch to ActionScript Build Path.
    
9. Enter the copied address into «Output folder URL», clear the html name (e.g. App.html).
   
10. Click «OK» and you’re done. You can now Run and Debug as if your website was hosted on some server and you had a 256K ADSL connection (instead of your T1).

Note: I tried to automate the whole thing (with Ant of course) and succeeded to a certain limit. What I did was download Sloopy’s source code (java), modify it so it can handle more terminal attributes and build the  .jar file. This can be run on command line, which will start the sloopy server. So I created an ant file that does all that for me, but this ant file would only be cool, if it could also trigger the run or debug commands and modify the output folder url. I haven’t found a way (at least not a satisfying one) to do this, so I might just follow the manual street for once ;)

Another note: If you are windows user, you might wanna try this Firefox plugin: Firefox Throttle

I figured a much much easier (compared to this) way to trigger Test Movie in Flash IDE from within Flex. What you’ll still need is Ant (here’s how to install), but that’s all you gonna need apart from Flex Builder and Flash. That’s the simplest ant build file to achieve this:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="Publish" default="Publish" basedir="./">
	<!-- project specifics -->
	<target name="Publish">
		<concat destfile="build.jsfl">
			fl.getDocumentDOM().testMovie();
		</concat>
		<exec executable="open" failonerror="true" logerror="true">
			<arg line="build.jsfl" />
		</exec>
		<delete file="build.jsfl" />
	</target>
</project>

This tests the frontmost document in Flash IDE. (basically what does this plugin). Tested on Mac OS X 10.5.5 with Flex Builder Pro 3.0.2 and Flash CS4.

No need for FlashCommand. No need to alter the file for other projects. Just a super easy file for people with not too many requirements.

You can still go more advanced with something like that:
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