Archive for the ‘MXNA’ Category

The new flash player 10.1 on Windows and Mac breaks embedded font rendering. See image below.

This is very disappointing. This is going to affect my customers badly, and there is nothing I can tell them. Just another reason to be very nervous about the future of Flash.

Before 10.1 on the Left, After 10.1 on the right.
Hopefully there will be a fix for this soon.

The announcement of the iPad has set off a huge Flash v. Apple the rest of the world debate.

I happen to think reasoned thought should take effect, hence I agree with the John Nack.

Flash is the closest thing we have to a consistent rich browser frame work. That is why I wrote Lifetick in Flex. I have thought about moving it to HTML only, but I don’t want to do it just yet.

Well, not until we have a richer html/javascript/css world – with a broad range of native gui controls (and which 99% of the world’s internet users have a compatible browser – no IE6, 7 or 8). Standards take time to create, to be agreed on and adopted by the masses.

However, my support of Flash has been tested, I have dropped my Flash blog, and you are now reading this in HTML. In my mind, Mac performance has never been more critical to the future of the Flash player.

btw, I find it laughable all those people who criticise Flash web ads… what do you think advertises will do if people all have flash blockers?They will make the exact same ads work in javascsript, which if written just as poorly as their flash versions, will screw up your browser just as bad, and you can’t separate that cpu thread out, or block an individual execution of javascript if it all goes bad or you want to block it. Think about it, those ads will not go away, even if Flash did.

My personal take on Flash on the iPad… Yes I would like to see it. Flash on the iPhone – I doubt it would work performance wise.

Tonight I relaunch my website as a HTML wordpress template for the first time. For the last 5 years or so I have always run a Flash based website. I even sold the flash wordpress template to lots of other enthusiastic people (note: still for sale).

So why have I gone HTML? Several reasons;

1) Mac performance. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, Flash’s performance on OSX sucks. Infact I haven’t seen it this bad since I ran Flash 7 back in 2005. The truth is Flash had come a long was, versions 8 and 9 made huge performance improvements. However these gains have been lost and it makes it difficult, if not impossible to create large scale flash sites for the Mac.

It’s not impossible though! I also develop Adobe Flex applications and they are ok. Whilst it might take 80% CPU to run a YouTube clip, a Flex application I developed (Lifetick) runs at about 13% CPU and performs quite well.

If Adobe want to keep Flash as a viable development platform, they have to address this issue quickly.

2) The Flash IDE sucks. It’s too clunky, slow and just painful to use. The transition to AS3 was a nightmare (and I was familiar with AS3 already  from working with Flex… go figure). I was able to put together this new template in just 2 nights (there is still more work I want to do to refine it) but all the work I did was done in TextMate, a fantastic powerful lightweight text editor which does heaps with out all the pain.

3) CSS3 and transparent PNGS. Advanced CSS and using transparent PNG graphics allowed me to create this template faster. In particular the Navigation bar owes a lot to this. None of this might be terribly new, but my eyes are opening up to the possibilities.

It really pained me to write this, I get really annoyed when I read people putting Flash down, they mention stuff like no deep-linking (solved, check out SWFAddress), and terrible user experience (Flash doesn’t create bad websites, people do!). Whilst my love of flash websites has taken a hit, my love of Flex is only stronger. I still consider it the best way to create a rich web based application. My day job revolves around developing a HTML base application, but my spare time is spent working on a Flex based application. And I fell like I work faster in Flex, and deliver far better results.

So I don’t want to see Flash die, I want it to get stronger, I want Flex to get more acceptance in the Web-apps developer sphere. But most of all I want Adobe to work on the Flash player’s performance. Seriously guys, you are running out of time before too much damage has been done and your technology is worthless.

Here is some interesting performance observations I have mad since installing Snow Leopard.

Flash 10 in Safari appears slower.

However, if you are using Camino, Flash performance is significantly better. (maybe better than Leopard – just a feeling)

Firefox, seems about the same as before, although I don’t really like using it. Chrome is the same as Safari.

If you work with a lot of Flash apps and need the best performance, switch to Camino

I have installed Snow Leopard… and now the Flex compatibility results.

Flex Builder 2 – FAIL.
Changing some configuration files did allow me to open Flex Builder, and I was able to compile some apps, but my large app with embedded images failed to compile.

Flex Builder 3 – SUCCESS
Unfortunately I had to buy Flex Builder 3… anyway… it appears to be fine.
On a separate note, when I tried to compile an app using the version 2 SDK, it put a Charting watermark on my app. Not happy considering I have the full version.

Flex Builder 4 Beta (latest) – SUCCESS
I didn’t try for long, but all appeared successful.

I just found out that you can’t run Flex builder on OSX Snow Leopard. That SUCKS!

Adobe please fix asap!

mmm. this sort of thing makes me nervous about a proprietary platform (flex sort of is, especially if you want an IDE). Maybe I should look closer at using the SDK on its own.

I am currently running Flex Builder 2, but am keen to hear from any who has been able to get any version of Flex builder running on Snow Leopard, and how good the performance is.

UPDATE: Well, there have been a couple of encouraging comments from people who have got it running. Thanks guys!

Perhaps Adobe should come out and clarify their position.

UPDATE 2: See the results: here

Hi all,

My new Flash – WordPress template is now available from my lab. It is coded in Actionscript 3 using Flash CS4.

You can check out the example site in the lab too.

For more details click here

Hi all,

After several months of working in my spare time, I have finally launched a new version of my website, this time based on Actionscript 3.

I still have more work I want to do on the site before I am happy with it. Both visually, and behind the scenes.

Converting my website to AS3 was more difficult than I ever imagined. I have written a lot of stuff using Adobe Flex (see Lifetick’s app) and am very familiar with AS3 but in the Flash IDE it was very tough.

Flex builder is based on Eclipse and it is a very strong coding environment. For a start, all classes are automatically imported, there is great code completion (including completing your own classes, variables, function etc…) The debugging is excellent, including debugging from the browser, and it will not even compile if you have a problem in your code (flash sort of did this, but too many mistakes went through with out identification)

The problems with Flash CS4 are too numerous to mention. Aside from Performance, the workspace layout feels too complicated and cluttered. The new motion editor for tweens seems great, but just makes it harder to do simple tweens (maybe I need more time with it) The debugging was very difficult. As I said before, you could not debug from the browser only from a stand alone swf (if I am wrong about that, please correct me in the comments with instructions), The connection between classes and movie clips feels disjointed, movie clips are not as strict as classes but it feels weird to code, plus I didn’t seem to be able to override a function of the class my movie clip is based on.

At the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy making this new version of my site, I felt I battled with Flash the whole time, everything was a struggle, and it left me wanting to return to Flex as fast as possible. If you do any application building, you must try Flex, and leave flash behind, you will not believe the difference.

ps: I have removed the AS2 version of my template from sale, I hope to make the AS3 version available for sale at a later date.

I often hear people asking why I didn’t use XML RPC when I created my WordPress – Flash Blog.

I thought I needed to explain my reasoning.

First up, WordPress’s XML-RPC API appears to designed mainly for Creating Editing posts, not designing a front end. So you need to think about that fact when looking at my reasoning. For backend integration, it is alright… I guess.

My main criticism of the XML-PRC process is how verbose the XML requests and responses are.
By knowing exactly what information I need to make a database request, and exactly what information I need back, I can simplify the xml requests and responses to make them, smaller, faster, and simpler to understand and work with.

Here is a samplexmlrpc response, and a samplepressconnect response. The Press Connect response is half the size of the xml-rpc.

I know there are advantages to the xml-rpc specification, but I can’t personally warm too much to something that verbose when I can write my own function which does the job in half the time, and something which I find easier to work with.

Out of no-where I designed a new look for my website. I had been playing around with a few designs for the last few months, but at the end of last week, I finally hit a new design a liked, I hope you like it to.

I also have a few more blog posts planed and maybe even some new Flex code for the lab.

I am still selling the .fla template I used for my last site. I have no plans to re-sell this template at the moment.

I also must apologise for what I consider a usability flaw with the site, and that is that it doesn’t reset the scroll position when you change pages, but I had to disable that functionality because of a really bad redraw bug with Firefox on the Mac. – gee I hate Firefox on the mac! As always, I recommend Camino – but it is afflicted with the same bug because it uses the Mozilla engine. If anyone has any tips for a work around please share. (basically if I reset the scroll position using javascript, the flash movie goes white, except for any areas which have redrawn – like a button, or loading icon, but the rest of the movie remains completely white!!!)

For new visitors, this is a flash blog, which uses a WordPress backend. I have developed my own php scripts to extract the data (which you can get for free from my lab), and just incase you are wondering why I don’t use XML-RPC, I plan to write about my reasons soon… hopefully.

Enjoy the site