Flash Lite Friday – Tip of the Day #16
February 15th, 2008 by scottjanousek
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...This Flash Lite Friday Tip (belated, sorry) is related from something brought up in John Agger’s (Adobe, Mobile and Devices) Adobe Mobile Podcasts (which I was just catching up on).
In it, among examples of Flash Lite 3 video and other Flash Mobile tid-bits, John talks about performance calibration in ADC (Adobe Device Central).
Although most reading this will already will be familiar with the later … it’s always good to remember to have this in your mobile workflow, particularly if you are a mobile designer and/or animator.
Hence, this tip is about two things:
# 1.
First, when you click the “Calibrate” button; Adobe Device Central is running through a set of predefined tests to arrive at an estimated performance of your content as it might appear in on-device execution and given the selected device profile you are currently working with (as per its pre-assigned performance index rating as determined by Adobe & OEM during certification process).
Don’t forget you must check “Simulate Performance” in order for estimated on-device performance to be simulated from the calibration just performed earlier!
# 2.
Secondly, once you arrive at a rough indication of on-device performance will be like (usually within 70%-80% of actual on-device performance) … it is time to fine tune that!
By using the speed slider within the performance panel you can further fine tune this to approximate what will happen on your intended device.
Just run the actual output SWF down on your device, while meanwhile adjusting the same content SWF running in Adobe Device Central using the same device profile. Try to adjust until both are in sync (or close enough).
One other thing to add … setting quality level can give you further indications on whether you should further optimize or otherwise temporarily toggle performance during a specific animation running (an “oldie”, but a “goodie” tip).
I’ll save how to do that for a future Flash Lite Friday Tip … but basically you just set quality level to low or medium for a specific number of frames … and then back to high quality when done.
Summary
If you are more of a mobile designer… working with your fair share of animations within games, wallpapers, screen savers, etc you probably already know and have incorporated this into your workflow … if not, now is a good time to incorporate performance tuning within this tip.
Just remember that the performance calibration is for screen rendering performance … so those developing more lightly animated Flash Lite applications … don’t expect it to necessarily tell you if your AS code is actually a bottle neck.