Mike Chambers

I have just posted information about FlashCamp San Francisco, a free developer / designers event that we will be holding in the Adobe San Francisco Office on Friday night, April 16th. This will be similar to the other world wide FlashCamps going on this spring, with this event focusing on Flash Player 10.1, Flash CS5, Flash Builder and Flash mobile development.

Register for FlashCamp San Francisco

From the event page:

FlashCamp San Francisco is a free one night event hosted by Adobe covering everything you need to know about about the latest Flash Platform tools and technologies, including Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Flash CS5, Adobe Flash Builder 4 and mobile design and development.

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There has been a lot of buzz in the mobile space lately, and I suspect there will be even more around Windows Phone 7 at next week’s Microsoft Mix conference. One thing I wanted to clarify as it may have been lost in some of the other news is that Adobe and Microsoft are working together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series.

I dont have an eta or other specifics right now, but it is something that both Adobe and Microsoft are working closely together on.

Two of the things that Flash is often criticized for is that it:

1. Uses too much CPU
2. Performs significantly worse on the Mac than on Windows

This got me thinking about whether some quick tests would bear this out, and if so, whether it was isolated to just Flash content.

Below are some raw numbers showing CPU usage of various rich content across different browsers and operating systems. This includes video deployed via HTML 5, JavaScript / Canvas animations, Flash Video, and Flash animations. This is by no means a scientific study, but I do think the results show that:
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Here are my slides from my FITC Amsterdam talk titled Building High Performance iPhone Applications with ActionScript 3.

Sorry I ran a little short of time, but you can find all of the info in the slides.

Here is the link to the Simple Game Framework which I discussed during the session.

In response to my post on Mouse Events and hover in Flash Player content on touch devices, John Gruber (daringfireball.net) raises an issue:

The problem, though, for a hypothetic Flash plugin that renders pages within web pages (as on traditional desktop browsers), is how to tell whether a tap-and-drag within a Flash element is supposed to scroll the entire web page or be passed as a mouse movement event to the Flash element. It can’t do both, and it can’t read the user’s mind.

This is a potential issue, and as John notes, is one not isolated to Flash content (scrolling textareas have similar issues on a touch device).

Here is how the current pre-release builds of Flash Player 10.1 handle this on the Nexus One (I havent had a chance to confirm for the other devices).
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So, the Interwebs is all a buzz again around the latest article that “proves” that Flash will not be useful on mobile devices (much less the iPad). From the article:

Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware.

That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.

Basically, the writer is arguing that because some Flash content uses Mouse over / hover events (MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER), and because there is no such event as a hover on a touch devices, then apparently, most Flash content just flat out wont work on touch devices.

I wanted to make a quick post that corrects some of the false assumptions and conclusions presented in the article, which include:
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You may have noticed that since September, the public Flash Platform (Flash Player, Flex, etc…) bug base has required a login in order to browse and view bugs. This was not the case when we initially launched the public bug base but after a number of issues (primarily caused by spam), we had to disable viewing bugs without registration.

Starting last night, we are rolling out some new updates and tweaks to the bug base, and will be doing some testing to ensure that the original issues are addressed. As of right now, you can once again browse the Flash Platform bug base without registration (although logging issues or commenting still requires registration). Over the next couple of weeks, you may see some changes in access as we test and ensure everything is working, but the ultimate goal is to allow viewing and browsing of entries without requiring registration.

Yesterday, Apple announced their new tablet device, the iPad. Even if you are able to step back from all of the hype and reality distortion field surrounding the announcement, it is still an impressive device, once which I would love to get my hands on.

However, as a developer and Mac user, I am increasingly concerned with Apple’s movement toward creating a locked down, and closed ecosystem and platform. A platform where Apple controls which applications developers can deploy, and which applications and content users can consume.
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Sorry for the two month hiatus on posting. I was on a sabbatical and vacation from work for the last 6 weeks of 2009, and have spent the first couple of weeks of 2010 busy working on code, and preparing some events for the spring (more on that in another post).

Some of the stuff I have continued to spend a lot of time working on, has been building iPhone content using the Flash CS5 private beta. I have been doing a lot of work on trying to figure out how to get the best performance, and understand the limits of Flash content on the device. I plan to make a separate post on that in the next couple of days.
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I have just completed running all of the performance tests for the ActionScript 3 Development Task Contest #1.

The result below are tentative until I have confirmed that the code follows the rules (and spirit) of the contest. If you see any issues with any of the top 5 submissions, please post them in the comments. You can view all of the entries in the contest’s GitHub repository.

Here are the results:
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