As promised, here’s the pdf of my recent Max 2008 session “Optimizing Adobe AIR for Code Execution, Memory, and Rendering“. There’s a good amount of Flash VM tips and tricks in there for reference whether you’re working in the browser or AIR. Thanks to everyone who attended and gave me high marks for my session. I guess I have to start thinking about what to talk about next year. For anyone who didn’t get to see the session live, the pdf really only tells half the story, so you may want to check out the session when it shows up on http://tv.adobe.com soon.
Category Archives: Flex
Web app to extract torrent files out of Blizzard Downloader
Diablo 3 was announced today and like many thousands of other gamers online right now I’m trying to download the 800mb high def gameplay trailer while putting up with the very clumsy Blizzard Downloader application. For those who don’t know, the Blizzard Downloader is just a mini BitTorrent client with a single torrent file baked in. I’m not a big fan of the downloader because I already have a BitTorrent client that’s much better at bandwidth allocation and my firewall’s already set up for that client. I’d much rather download the movie with my own client instead of Blizzards so I’ve written a little flash app to help facilitate that.
To use this, just point the app at the url of any Blizzard Downloader exe file online (I’m not sure if it’ll work with the .dmg files) and hit the ‘Extract’ button. A link will pop up below that you can click to save the torrent file. The file has no name by default so you’ll have to rename it ‘whatever.torrent’ after it finishes downloading. The resulting torrent will still connect to Blizzards tracker and you’ll download the same file you would be if you were using the Blizzard Downloader app.
This should work with all browsers other then IE 7 and below, since IE doesn’t support the data:URI scheme to create dynamic files.
Example URLs:
Diablo 3 Gameplay Downloader
Starcraft 2 Gameplay Downloader
More Info:
Blizzard Downloader Wiki
Introducing GUIMark – An RIA benchmark for Flex, Silverlight, HTML and more
If you’re wondering why I’ve been quiet the past few weeks it’s because I’ve been devoting most of my free time to finishing off a new benchmark I’m releasing today called GUIMark. GUIMark is kinda like an Acid3 test on speed that’s geared towards RIA technologies. The goal was to figure out how to implement a reference design in different runtimes and then benchmark how smoothly that design could be animated. So far I have implementations in DHTML, Flex, Java, Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2. All the results and and implementation details can be found under the GUIMark page.
GUIMark shares alot in common with another RIA benchmark Bubblemark. I’ve written a bit about Bubblemark and why I think an alternative is necessary, but I do believe Bubblemark and GUIMark can coexist while serving 2 different purposes. Alexey Gavrilov stated it best in that he sees Bubblemark as a sortof ‘Hello World’ launchpad into comparing different environments and I agree with him. Bubblemark is a *very* accessible test suite and its easy for any kind of developer to jump in and play around with performance techniques. GUIMark takes a different approach by trying to benchmark the types of UI elements common in our Web 2.0 world. This includes things like vector redraws, alpha transparencies, text reflow, bitmap motion, and 9 scale slicing rules. From there I just fill up the render pipeline until it becomes so over-saturated that it becomes easy to visually distinguish which rendering engines are more efficient then others. As a result, the benchmark is more complicated on a visual level and requires a bit more time then Bubblemark to understand the implementation rules. Lastly with GUIMark I’ve tried to get into some of the lower level details behind how rendering engines work and how that’s affected the creation of this project.
I’m hoping that developers and designers will be able to use this test suite to identify any pros or cons to choosing a particular environment when visual transitions are a key element of the experience. I’m also hoping these benchmarks provide a spotlight for the community that we can turn toward the runtime engineers inside Sun or Adobe or Mozilla to demand better performance.