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You didn’t read it, did you. Well, it’s basically a very well-formed rant lamenting the sad state of the Flash program (not the platform). There are so many things that needed to be said here. I have been aware of the sorry state of the Flash IDE ever since CS3 came out but never took the time to construct such a compelling article as Kevin has.

ActionScript has matured from a simple frame-based script to a full-fledged language but the Flash IDE remains a glorified animation program (I am reluctant to even call it an ‘IDE’). Most of us who are serious developers are happy to switch to more powerful programming environment such as FlexBuilder, however there are thousands of users who learned programming on Flash who shouldn’t have to switch just because Adobe decided that we’re all either designers or developers. There should be a sense of responsibility to the huge workforce of artisans and engineers who rely on this product to make a living.

On that note, I am very pleased that they decided to change the name from FlexBuilder to FlashBuilder. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been in a scenario like this…

Flash Guy: “Import statements are a pain in the ass.”

Me: “I know. But using FlexBuilder makes it a lot easier because the imports are automated.”

Flash Guy: “But I’m not working on a Flex project.”

Me: *Hand to forehead*

The name FlashBuilder helps to support the idea of the Flash Platform which encompasses many technologies. Danny Patterson has makes some good points on the subject on his blog as well. Most interestingly, the suggestion to change the name of Flash Professional CS4 to Flash Designer CS4.

I think Adobe opened the flood gates to these types of discussions wheen they decided to treat designers and developers as separate camps but I’m glad they’re rethinking their approach.

• Banner ads
• ActionScript 2.0
• Last minute crazy hectic projects
• Working with recruiters (Actually, this one was from a couple of years ago)

Some people say I’m crazy or that this sort of work is unavoidable or that it may be shitty but is highly lucrative. However, I always try to avoid projects where I cannot reasonably predict success. Banner ads, AS2 projects, and last minute work all have in common that they seem more subject to chaos than the usual job. Banner ads are difficult to plan because they require loads of tweaks, tedious restraints such as file size restrictions, and duplication of effort for multiple sizes or multiple ad standards across target sites. Or at least they have in my experience so far. ActionScript 2.0, aside from being nearly obsolete, tends to encourage poor programming practices by being a hybrid of non-OOP and OOP paradigms. Last minute fixes and jobs that need to be done ASAFP are rife with issues: the time a developer needs to familiarize himself with unfamiliar code is usually not considered, formal architecture and design is omitted leading to freestyle coding, and because the deadline is so short, if even a tiny issue arrises the project is fucked. Of course, any project can get out of control, but with a little forewarning and careful choices, chaos can be avoided. These types of projects tend to practically guarantee that there will be issues and that there won’t be a smart way to negotiate them.

As for recruiters (or staffing agents, or talent scouts, or whatever else they call themselves), in hard times they might seem like a necessary evil. Still, I feel that I can almost always find a much higher quality match with an employer or employee by direct referrals from other colleagues and friends in the industry – even if it’s through linkedin. Besides, I’ve had enough shady recruiters call me with “incredible offers” on nights and weekends to make me want to disconnect my phone.

So no offense to anyone else who is stuck making banners for their job. I know that all of these things are a neccessary part of our industry. However, I personally don’t want to be involved anymore. I seriously am going to add a “no-banner” clause to my next contract. Instead, I hope to focus on some of the following things that make me happy…

• Game and application development
• Working with people whom I respect and enjoy
• Writing books and blogging

Wish me luck!

When people ask me how much it costs to make a website, my answer is always “A website costs as much as a car.” This invariably triggers the response “Oh, ok… Wait, what kind of car?”
“Exactly.”

A car can be many things. A new sedan, a used 1987 stationwagon, a hummer limo, a highly tuned race car, or a smart car with a 2-year lease are all examples of cars. They may range in price from a few hundred bucks to several hundred thousand or even a monthly fee or sometimes even free.

Websites are the same way. Based on the complexity, customization, features, and level of detail, a site can span the same range of prices. Many people decide that they want or need a website without asking the basic questions that help guide the process like “what is the goal of the site”. Quite often, the actual needs are very simple and generic solutions (such as a PayPal shopping cart) are ideal – the same way that a person commuting 10 miles to work needs a reliable but modest car to get them there and not a sports car (or sometimes it’s better to take public transit). I’ve found that describing the work in these terms tends to help potential customers to create more realistic expectations and reconsider their needs by presenting the concept of a website not as a fixed product but as a toolkit of solutions to specific business needs.

I’m not promising anything, but hopefully this has been the first entry in a short series on my work philosophies. Stay tuned!

In the spirit of playing fair, I’d love to hear about your experiences with Zinc – good, bad, or obselete.

gTween is a small (4.5kb), fast (1500 instances, 0.5s duration, ~25fps), instance based tweening class, with a huge number of options and capabilities.

The definition of ‘fast’ in terms of Flash Player performance is somewhat of a mystery. We’re looking for high frame rate i guess? Lots of things on stage? Total time of operations? But frame rate and number of instances don’t really tell the whole story. There are a number of factors that make the Flash Player performance a very difficult thing to measure.

• Flash Player performance varies based on the speed of the viewer’s computer.

That’s nothing new. All apps deal with this. However, Flash Player has these added complications.

• Flash Player performance varies based on what version of the player is being used.
• Flash Player performance varies based on the browser in which it is embedded.
• The browsers’ Flash Player runs at a different speed as desktop versions (browsers seem to have a speed cap around 50 or 60 fps while stand alone versions do not)
• Loading times for external assets must sometimes be taken into account.
• Framerates can vary based on the set framerate of the Flash app. Rumored ‘magic framerates’ may affect this as well.
• Flash Player can sometimes hang, crash, or self-destruct if too many processes are going on at once.
• Flash Player 10′s support for video hardware should complicate things further (although it will probably make our lives easier in the long run).

The results of our latest benchmark

As far as I know, there is no single standard for testing performance of Flash applications (unless you count the Flex Profiler which we probably should). I’ve definitely seen benchmark tests for comparing specific operations, like tweening and 3d rendering, but they are usually very specific to the task at hand and the results are difficult to compare because of all the variables.

Any good scientific experiment will always measure a control group. That is, a test of a relatively variable free environment used as a baseline measure. In the case of Flash Player performance, this would be some fixed set of functions that may produce different results on different platforms but should reflect the overall performance of each platform. For example, a suite of math and visual computations similar to the ones found here. This would allowing us to describe test operations in terms of a multiplier of the baseline. In other words if the baseline took 623ms with an average framerate of 45fps and a Tweener test took 2430ms @ 37fps you might say that the results were 3.9*base time @ 82% frame rate. Ideally, this number would stay more or less the same regardless of which computer or player it was running on.

I had considered what might happen if there was a public forum for posting swf files. There, a developer could post a file and gather averaged data from the other users of the site. The price of this data would be that the developer would participate by viewing, say, 5 other projects thus insuring that there will be plenty of eyes on the work that’s posted.

But in my experience, the average Flash developer has a very different setup from the intended audience. So another possible solution is to create a testing environment based on the most popular machine spec. As this post at Draw Logic points out, we don’t really know that much about the hardware specs for our audiences, although, we could probably assume that the average user has Flash Player 9.0 and is using a single-core, Windows-based machine and Internet Explorer.

Caleb Johnston of this blog notes:

I think that the machine-standard is a bad idea because the reality is that performance is relative. That’s how Flash works… its an important thing that everybody neglects. I think that people should be more aware that their program may run faster/slower on different machines.

In the end, the best practices for benchmarking in Flash Player remain elusive. What do you think about this? My questions to you, the reader:

1. Broadly, what is the best way to benchmark in Flash? What techniques have you used successfully?
2. What are the factors we’re interested in when measuring success? Framerate? Total time of operation? Something else? What are the best practices for measuring these factors?
3. How can we overcome some of the pitfalls pointed out in this article?

I’m looking forward to reading your comments!

I may be in the (rare?) position of being highly interested in two disparate technologies. The first being an online scripting language standard governed by ECMA (used in Javascript & Actionscript). The second, an open standard for real-time rendering governed by the Khronos Group (OpenGL). In recent days these two languages have faced most unfortunate developments. First the ECMA script 4…

On Nov 7, 2006 Adobe announced the contribution of their ECMA scripting engine to the open source community under the name “Tamarin”. Tamarin is also being used as the JS scripting engine for Mozilla Firefox under the name “SpiderMonkey“. It seemed like a good idea at the time of release. But now look at the situation: we have AVM2, directly connected to Firefox AND the ECMA committee –slowing the progress of Actionscript and the Flash Player (and the internet for that matter). Needless to say, this is a disappointment. But it doesn’t end there…

Though having plenty of contributors, the realm of real-time rendering is primarily controlled by Microsoft, Nvida, ATI/AMD, Apple, and (more recently) Intel. Microsoft hasn’t really contributed to the Khronos Group because long ago they decided to pursue their own 3D graphics rendering API known as Direct3D. The evolution of OpenGL has become painfully slow while DirectX and Direct3D are becoming the (de-facto) standard. Finally, the Khronos group promised to improve the long lost API by introducing an object-oriented structure in stark contrast to its current state machine model. That was in October 2007. Last week the specification was finally unveiled and it remains largely the same. Not only is this a big let down, but it will definitely damage all future 3D software and game development releases for non-Windows platforms (including future consoles). Very unfortunate.

DISCLAIMER: Both of these developments are FAR more complex than what this post outlines -and there’s justification behind both developments. But on the whole, they both seem bad for everybody (or just me?).