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Flash9 AS3 Market Now At 91% Penetration Availability

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

Adobe released the numbers on Flash9/AS3 capabilities/penetration of the market and AS3 is now even more ready for primetime at 91%.

AS3 and the new Flash9 virtual machine AVM2 is ready to be used and performance gained from it. When you develop AS2 in Flash9 it uses the older, clunkier AVM1, this does not give the performance benefit that using AS3 and the new virtual machine will give you.

Currently AS3 apps are about 6-10 times faster than the AS3 counterparts. Also, AS2 code and the community is drying up and moving to AS3 where it is much more capable and ready for better performance of things like pseudo 3d engines like papervision, sandy and away3d and it can handle all types of binary manipulation and sockets that lead to very coo apps like emulators, pdf creators, compression tools, and of course with more performance, better games and more room for more content.

Flash9 AS3 penetration as of June 1, 2007:

Flash Player 6 Flash Player 7 Flash Player 8 Flash Player 9
Mature Markets1 99.3% 99.3% 98.5% 90.3%
US/Canada 99.4% 99.4% 98.7% 90.5%
Europe2 99.3% 99.1% 98.2% 90.5%
Japan 99.8% 99.8% 99.0% 89.8%
Emerging Markets3 97.7% 97.6% 94.4% 89.4%

[source]

This is as of June, it is September and most likely due to their projections that we are at 92% which is almost critical mass.

But ok, cmon, is it really worth it in performance?

Well back in late 2006 Carlos Ulloa did some early benchmarking which you can see here. As it turns out AS3 versions of the same effect from AS2 are at minimum 6-20 times faster. What can you do creatively with that much more power?

AS2 & AS3 Versions of the star test to compare AS2 to AS3 so you can judge for yourself [source]

My recommendation, get your AS3 learn on. See what BIG SPACESHIP thinks of AS3 here. Big Spaceship just recently got added to thefwa’s hall of fame – one of three agencies all time.

For future reuse of code and knowledge and to get the most performance out of our creative projects, it is the best option NOW. Your competitors are moving to it and already making more compelling offerings, how long are you going to hack it with just AS2 skills?

A good place to start learning is at kirupa and the senocular posts.

The trajectory of the flash player penetration should complete to around 95-96% by teh end of the year judging by the current player and flash 8 penetration trajectory, Flash9 has gone from 85% to 91% in 3 months, it slows down to about 2% a month once it hits 90% until a critical mass of around 98% for each player. Essentially by 2008 everyone should have moved on to AS3, if you haven’t, well…

Posted in ACTIONSCRIPT, ACTIONSCRIPT3, ARCHITECT, AS2, AS3, DEVELOPMENT, FLASH, FLEX, GAMEDEV, MARKET, PERFORMANCE, PROGRAMMING | Comments Off

FlashDevelop 3 Alpha Released: Best Flash IDE Gets an Upgrade

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketObligatory posting on FlashDevelop3 Alpha being released.  To people like me alpha means “old school” released.  I am ready to use it today!

Download it here

If you are not using FlashDevelop for your coding portion of your flash application, you might be missing out.  There is a reason some of the best actionscripters (ahem actioncoders) use it.

Posted in .NET, ACTIONSCRIPT, APPLICATIONS, AS2, AS3, DESKTOP, FLASH, NEWS, PROGRAMMING, TOOLS | Comments Off

Fluid Flash Layouts

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketHere’s how to do Fluid Flash layouts quickly without Flex.

Fluid layouts are not new but fhard to come by documentation.

To create a Flash fluid layout, essentially what you do is create a Flash movie that is set to 100% in HTML/SWFObject/XHTML but scaling set to noScale. Then in the flash script you position each element as needed on a resize handler.

This works great for applications built in Flash that will need to scale such as an IDE, a word processor, an image editing programs or programs that might have floating panels and tools.

1) Make your flash movie HTML scaled to the browser:

If you are using deconcept’s excellent SWFObject (be sure to download it) then see this sample for the HTML embedding with js swfobject.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

<title>blipgames.com</title>

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

<style type="text/css"> /* hide from ie on mac */

 html {

  height: 100%;

  overflow: hidden;

 }

#flashcontent {

  height: 100%;

 }

 /* end hide */

body {

  height: 100%;

  margin: 0;

  padding: 0;

}

</style>

</head>

<body>

 <div id="flashcontent">

  <strong>You need to upgrade your Flash Player</strong>

 </div>

<script type="text/javascript">

  // <![CDATA[

var so = new SWFObject("myMovie.swf", "myMovie", "100%", "100%", "8", "#efefef");

  so.addParam("scale", "noscale");

  so.write("flashcontent");

// ]]>

 </script>

</body>

</html>

2) Inside your flash code:

AS2

Stage.align = "TL"; // Top left align the stage

Stage.scaleMode = "noScale"; // Set noScale for containing stage.// CREATE A LISTENER OBJECTsizeListener = new Object();// ATTACH THE ON RESIZE EVENT TO THE LISTENERsizeListener.onResize = function()

{

// In the event call a method to move the items

// or, call each item here to be sized

movieToBeCentered._x = Stage.width/2;

movieToBeCentered._y = Stage.height/2;

movieToBeCentered._width = Stage.width * .5;

// add other movie clips to position...

};

// ADD THE LISTENER

Stage.addListener(sizeListener);


AS3


package

{

 import flash.display.*;

 import flash.events.*;

 import flash.utils.*;

public class AppMain extends MovieClip

 {

  public function AppMain()

  {

   stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE,onResize);

   stage.align = "TL"; // Top left align the stage

   stage.scaleMode = "noScale";  // items do not stretch to fit

  }


  public function onResize(event:Event)

  {

   // In the event call a method to move the items

   // or, call each item here to be sized

   movieToBeCentered.x = stage.width/2;

   movieToBeCentered.y = stage.height/2;

   movieToBeCentered.scaleX = stage.width * .5;

   // ... etc

  }

 }

}




This allows you to see easily how you can make a fluid layout in flash that scales with more of an alignment lock rather than the whole movie scaling.


A demo and toolkit will be available soon with an easy class library soon. For now you can go here to get a demo and source from the http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/liquid-flash-layout site.

				


				
 Posted in ACTIONSCRIPT,  AS2,  AS3,  FLASH,  INTERFACE,  SNIPPET,  TUTORIAL |   View Comments


			


			

		

			

			
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