Trying out Reducer and TurboDieselSportInjection

I am very impressed by the work from Joa Ebert, especially the Hobnox audiotool that keeps blowing my mind every time i go and se it / showing it to others.

Joa has been working on a suite of tools to optimize swf files. Specifically he has developed software to read and write swf bytecode. And while doing this the software can optimize different things.

I have looked at the reducer.jar tool and the tdsi.jar tool(TurboDieselSportInjection).

The reducer tool can optimize png's embedded in the swf file, and thus reduce the size of you file. It does that by converting the png into a jpeg, but doing some alpha channel magic on the way so you do not loose transparancy.

I have tried the reducer on a couple of files:

File1.swf 395kb. developed in flex, containing a bunch of embedded png "icons".
File2.swf 947kb. developed in flex, containing almost no embedded pngs.
File3.swf 510kb. developed in flex, containing a mix of embedded pngs.

File 1 and 2 only got reduced a couple og bytes. This does however makes sense because the reducer does not "reduce" very small png's because these acually sometimes can get larger.

File 3, contained a very large png - 1000X1000 pixels. It is almost 100 kb in it self. Running the reducer on this swf with the default settings i got a reduction of about 42 kb!

This is really impressive! just by running a simple command i get a reduction of about 10% - very nice. Oh and by the way the result was not different visually from the original :)

Then i quickly tried out the TurboDieselSportInjection (I love that name!) on of my current projects. It is a data centric project that retrieves a lot of data from a php backend. Retrieving 5000 rows of data in about 4 seconds. Running the tdsi on this project acutally made the swf - start more quicly! - it took a couple of second of - how many is difficult to say but it is clearly an improvement from before.

With the Apparat suite that Joa is working on, he has really opened up the world of how much the swf files can be optimized by running a couple of simple commands. Very impressive!

Now if only Adobe would take the same measures into their compiler...

Alex Cassoni did an Ignite preso at Hello this monday. Check it out! Very nice...

Guerrilla v. Marketing v. Now – Alex Cassoni – 2009 10 26

Guerrilla v. Marketing v. Now - Alex Cassoni - 2009 10 26

View more presentations from Hello Group.

AIR 2 Enhancements Complete Overview

Elad Elrom from InsideRia, has made a post about the new stuff in Air 2.0. He goes through each item giving a great overview of all the cool things to come!

Adobe announcing Flash Player 10.1

The upcomming Flash Player 10.1 was Adobe MAX conference in L.A. today.

The list of features looks good, there are especially a lot of new stuff regarding devices and media.

Look here for a list of features, and here for some demos.

Flash Player 10.1 is a big upgrade for devices. It is a full version of the Flash Player, and has support for Hardware acceleration, multi-touch, accelerometer.

Things are looking good in the Flash world!

Adobe Cookbooks

Adobe has released cookbooks 2.0, a new place for sharing and finding tips & tricks as well as code samples...

Se more at:

http://cookbooks.adobe.com/home

Sometimes it really is helpful to look at the FLEX SDK source.

For some time now, we have had a problem with truncating labels in our project MyHome.

When the text on labels was to long we got "null" errors like this:











For a long time we simply changed the text to fit, or changed the layout fit the text.

The other day I again had this issue, and I got a bit intruiged at how the truncateToFit() function worked.

So I took a look at the source code, and to my surprice I found out that the ellipsis (...) text was actually a localized string! :














Quickly reading the asdoc's revealed the following: (I must say, that it is a bit vague - no info on the bundlename etc...)







So after adding a resource text (...) to the bunde "core" the result was: (tadaaaa)

Font rendering in Flex 4 makes any developer happy!

James Ward has a nice little post about thenew flex 4 font rendering engine.

I am looking forward to starting a project purely based on flex 4!

Interesting Flash/Flex frameworks from Spicefactory

Peter Molgaard just sent me this link: http://www.spicefactory.org/

This looks like a very interesting framework for Flash/Flex - expecially the Parsley framwork looks interessting to me. Could this be another competitor to Cairngorm, PureMVC, MATE and Swiz?

Lets hope so, its great to see frameworks such as this, that helps the developer to create application using a well formed and standardized framework.

I will look into it, and blog when I know more :)

FlexMonkey 1.0 Released - Gorilla power!

The guys from http://www.gorillalogic.com/ have released the 1.0 version of FlexMonkey!

FlexMonkey is an Adobe AIR application used for testing Flex- and AIR-based applications. Providing the functionality to record, playback and verify Flex UI interactions, FlexMonkey also generates ActionScript-based testing scripts that you can easily include within a continuous integration environment.

This is something our Flex team @ Hello are gonna look more into. Our CI process could really benefit from this.

Nvidia cooperating with Adobe for optimizing flash.

NVIDIA and Adobe have announced that they are cooperating to optimize Flash Player, utilizing the GPU for better performance.

As part of the Open Screen Project Adobe is trying to leverage GPU video and graphics acceleration. And Nvidia is a huge competitor in the GPU area where many PC's and handheld devices are using an Nvidia processor for graphics.

This is good news, and will surely be welcomed in the flash community, leading towards next gen. flash content.

Read the full article here!