If you’ve been targeting mobile with the Flash platform or taking advantage of Stage3D on desktop then you’ll no doubt appreciate the need for good profiling tools. Mac OS X users have the excellent Instruments tool to help when developing for AIR for iOS but what about other mobile platforms or if you’re developing from a Windows machine? Well of course there’s the profiler that Adobe provides with Flash Builder and other excellent IDEs such as Flash Develop also have their own profiler but to be honest they’re all rather shallow when you consider the great features the Flash platform has to offer these days.
Thankfully Adobe are working on an advanced profiler named Monocle that will allow developers to debug at a very low level. It will allow you to profile live SWFs from the release version of the Flash player and will also work on mobile devices too. As your content runs, all sorts of information is sent to Monocle, including any Stage3D calls being made on the GPU. You can even step through each of the individual calls and watch the construction of each frame step by step. It’s all pretty impressive stuff and if you’d like to know more then I’d encourage you to take a look at the recording of Lee Brimelow’s session for the Denver Flash user’s group. He demos Monocle around the 37 minute mark but the whole video is definately worth watching.