Improving Starling’s Performance with Blend Modes

I’ve been impressed by the Starling framework but like many I’ve struggled to get a solid 60fps on some of the older mobile devices out there. For example, my recent parallax scrolling demo was capped at 30fps on iPad 1 whereas the iPad 2 was easily capable of running it at a full 60fps without […]

Launch Image Bug on Landscape iPad Apps

I had a conversation with interactive designer Chris Gannon the other day regarding a screen flicker he’d noticed when his iPad app was transitioning from its launch image to the first frame of its SWF. Of course the transition between the two should actually be seamless but Chris had noticed that an intermediate black screen […]

Default Deployment Settings in Flash Pro CS5.5

If you’re working your way through the code samples provided with Flash iOS Apps Cookbook then you may receive the following error when trying to publish each of the FLAs: It seems that when working with FLA files that were authored by someone else, your own copy of Flash Professional won’t try to use the […]

Local Variables and Garbage Collection

NOTE: I had originally used the Timer class in my example for this post but it seems the Timer class doesn’t follow the normal garbage collection rules as mentioned in BIT-101. Anyway code and description updated below. So what’s wrong with this code? package { import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.events.TimerEvent; import flash.sensors.Geolocation; public class Test extends […]

Masking the global trace function

Here’s a little trick I learned today regarding name spaces. I was writing a little custom debug class and decided to grace it with its own static trace() method that would ultimately make a call to ActionScript’s global trace() function. Basically I wanted all my tracing to go through this class but still maintain the […]