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Flash Performance

In this paper so far we've covered many disadvantages of the Flash platform, nearly all of which are fairly minor and can be worked around. Flash is like any platform, with its own list of weird quirks and annoying features and bugs. However, there is one major problem that deserves its own section: performance.

Advantages of Flash

So what is so hot about Flash? Briefly, the main advantages are:

What is Flash?

Flash has come a long way since the days of Punch the Monkey and Win advertisements. Flash 7 (known as MX 2004 at retail) is a modern interactive platform, with a powerful design and animation authoring tool, an object-oriented type-safe dynamic scripting engine, bitmap rendering with antialiasing and subpixel precision, and advanced video and audio playback features.

The Development Platform

In order to meet our constraints, we have the following requirements for our theoretical casual games development platform:

Casual Games

Before we get started, we should first talk about what exactly a "casual" game is.

Reading news feeds with XMLSA

I used to hate XML and all the looping across nodes to get data. Then I found a class called XMLSA, created by Max Ziebell. Using XMLSA, making a RSS news ticker/reader is easy.

Getting Across to Flash with Java

If you work in web applications, it's just a matter of time until someone suggests, "why don't we use Flash?" With Macromedia Flash, you can create juicy, enjoyable interfaces for your users, with a unique branded appearance. Moreover, Macromedia's tools and the Flash creation metaphors are understood by more graphic artists and interface designers than other options.

Breadcrumbs: Shared Objects

This tutorial will show you how to use the SharedObject, a powerful new feature in Flash MX. The SharedObject can do for Flash what cookies does for the Browser, but much better and simpler. This article assumes basic knowledge of Flash MX and Action Script.

Breadcrumbs: Dynamically Loading Images

This tutorial will show you how to dynamically load images from any URL. This article assumes basic knowledge of Flash MX.

Flash ActionScript - Objects

In the real world there are objects like i.e. an apple. An apple has properties like smell, color, size and position. We use objects in special ways that we can refer to as methods. In Flash, movie clips and buttons are objects.