Sometimes you need to test your Flash stuff with different plugin versions. Even if you just want to run some performance tests, it is very useful to switch to the release player (see below for another example).

For windows there is a neat Firefox Plugin that makes switching quite a snap. On Mac there is one too – I haven’t tested it, but it’s supposed to work (though I’m not too sure about that when I read these comments here). Still I prefer to work with Safari and I kind of dislike the thought of starting Firefox to just switch Plugins.

Fortunately I’ve found another solution: WSPluginSwitcher. This one comes as a Cocoa app and once configured (you really should read this wiki page), it works real well for me. Also they have prepared plugin versions for you to download (though the most recents are missing, but no big deal really).

As for the speed tests, let me just give you another example (impressing enough for me to wanna switch players for real world testing).

In Debug Player:

method...................................................ttl ms...avg ms
tare [2]                                                      0     0.00
CSSFastParser                                               603   120.60
CSSRegExpParserFast                                         987   197.40
CSSRegExpParserFastAdvanced                                1457   291.40
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

In Release Player:

method...................................................ttl ms...avg ms
tare [2]                                                      0     0.00
CSSFastParser                                               354    70.80
CSSRegExpParserFast                                         972   194.40
CSSRegExpParserFastAdvanced                                1469   293.80
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Both 10.0.22.87, and exported as release swf. Oh, and by the way tested with another useful tool from Grant Skinner: AS3 Performance Testing Harness.

Yesterday I had a presentation at the SFUG meeting covering some bits of my rewritten BBML framework (originated from the project laax.com). I’ve tried to share some insights into the technical concept and strategies for CSS parsing, CSS selectors and layout validation.

Picture by Marc Liyanage

It’s been surprisingly fun (I give credits to the beer sponsored by Nemos). People even managed to pretend they’d be interested in what I was prosing, so credit to them too!

I’d also like to mention that there’ll be the swiss flash event soon: Flash at the Lake will not only pamper you with appearances of great national and international Flash enthustiacs, it will also give anybody attending the pleasure to enjoy one of Zurich’s greatest locations with people who don’t think of you as a storm lightning adorer when you sit in the sun twittering Flash into the clear lake. And all that to a fantastic price. Check it out at fatl.ch

So here we go with the presentation (Quicktime so you can enjoy the marvelous effects):

• Atelier David Smith
  A simple but beautifully executed idea. You can resize, navigate by keyboard .. many details I like. Only thing: no mouse wheel support and not too nice aliased font in content section.
  (tags: flash inspiration portfolio typography agency)
• David Arias – Portfolio
  It's refreshing to see something so clean and simple, yet pretty. No effects, no animation. Clean and slick.
  (tags: inspiration portfolio html)

This is a follow-up of this.

Yeah well, I was more than optimistic to show those JS guys how fast Flash can be with the help of some brand new Adobe magic – but Pixel Bender was, unfortunately, quite disappointing:
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I did a quick port of a «graphic demo» called «metatunnel» (created by FRequency).

Paulo Falcão ported this to Javascript using canvas.

To make the set complete I ported Paulos JS version to Actionscript, just quick’n'dirty.

Click on it to start the animation:

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GridFitType has a great impact on Text rendering:

Well not really much to say here:

• NONE Good for animation and people who prefer Font appearance over readability
• SUBPIXEL Good compromise between readability (small sizes) and appearance
• PIXEL Pure nonsense if you ask me

What I really wonder though is: Why on earth can’t I adjust fractioned text sizes (aka float)??? In the IDE, yes you can. By actionscript, no you can’t. I don’t get it.. anybody knows why that is? And more importantly: is there some fancy workaround? (in the example I’m just scaling the text fields, but that’s not really a cool solution).

swffit is a great little library that smartly resizes your flash movie depending on its content. It gives you native scrollbars for free whenever your content is longer than the browser window. Another strategy is to always have the flash movie fill 100% the browser window and let Flash do the scrolling.

There are a lot of PRO for the swffit way:

• It gives users the system scrollbar. Users are used to that, they know what it means, they know how to deal with it.
• Mouse wheels just work! It’s scrolling a standard browser window, no magic at all: great! (You have to use this otherwise)
• It’s easy to implement.

Still there is a CONTRA side:

• You’ll need javascript (well, that’s no biggy at all – as a matter of fact, you’re just pretty in the desert without javascript in todays websites)
• You have no control over scrollbar design (neither a biggy – as another matter of fact I consider that a good thing anyway, but don’t tell the brand agency ;-)
• It has performance disadvantages. Well that I consider a biggy! Because the movie will always be in its full height, it will do rerender for the entire area!! Imagine long page with animations here and there: Given Flash’s «not so fast» rendering engine, this can become a huge performance killer. Let me give you a quick’n'dirty example: Full Height compared to «Cropped» to Window Height (just resize browser window to real small size to see the big difference).

Conclusion: I’m just glad I found one good reason to not declare my internal scrollbar like in www.betabong.com as complete bullshit ;-)

I did some speed tests today, comparing two string parsing methods. And I’ve made some very interesting discoveries: The execution speed between SWF compiled for debugging and those compiled without differs.

Ha! Okay, that’s not that much of news (even for me). But what astonishes me is how much this speed gap can be, especially when it comes to massive data calculations. I somehow always had a somewhat 20 percent speed decrease in mind (I was just presuming, me dumb). But for a 3d particle test we’re talking factor 8!!

Now this made me curious… so I’ve tested with Debug and Release Player both debug and release SWFs:

Debug Player running Debug SWF

Debug Player running Release SWF

Release Player running Debug SWF

Release Player running Release SWF

A few conclusions:

• Never release a SWF file with debug code (or otherwise said: put only stuff online from bin-release, never bin-debug). Though common users won’t notice the speed decrease, your friendly flash developers may, at least if you’re app is somewhat cpu intensive. And of course: debug SWF are much bigger in size (just in case you give a fuck about flash devs ;-)
• Speed tests should be played in the release player. Why? After all, I wouldn’t care if the relation would stay the same. Usually you just need to know how much faster one thing is compared to the other one, so that would do it. But unfortunately the ratio won’t always be the same. In the above example the ration is 3.66 for debug and 2.92 for release. And it can differ muuuuch more.

The last one bugs me quite a bit. It’s just a pain in the ass to export a release build each time you wanna compare performance. And it also means you can’t do quick’n'dirty trace outputs for the time result (not a biggy if you’re testing within a Flex project though).

So here we go with two wishes for Adobe:

• Let us quickly test release builds within Flex Builder (a simple command would do it – I thought it might be «Run Testapp» (instead of «Debug Testapp»), but that just doesn’t bring up the Debugger (and same speed)
• An option to turn off debugging mode in Debug Player!!! That would solve almost all problems, and we could also use our Plugin for normal browsing without performance penalties (is this why Youtube eats so much cpu here?

I don’t discover as many bugs nowadays as I’ve used to in the old days when I was beta testing for Macromedia. But it happened today, and I’ve just installed the newest Flash Player 10.0.22.87 to be sure.

It happens to DisplayObjects A inside DisplayObjectContainers B inside DisplayObjectContainer C, when

• A was not initially visible (not inside initial scroll rect of C)
• A is in 3D mode (I just change rotationY for that)
• B is in «cached as Bitmap» (cacheAsBitmap would do, I go with DropShadowFilter in the example)
• C’s scrollrect property is set, so A is shows up (well, it doesn’t – that’s the bug after all ;)

Here the example:

bug-3d-shadow.swf
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