Labs

I was in San Francisco this weekend attending the Apollo Camp event at Adobe on Friday evening. Between hanging out with some friends on the Apollo team .. Mike Downey, Mike Chambers, Danny Dura, Christian Cantrell .. and from the community .. Mims Wright, Roger Braunstein .. and enjoying complimentary pizza and beer, I learned a little more about the capabilities of Apollo.

Anyone reading this who isn't up to speed on Apollo and what it can do, now is the time to get caught up. Adobe has released the

Extremely talented developer and friend of the Spaceship, Roger Braunstein, has released Introduction to Flex as part of the O'Reilly Short Cut series. If you've been thinking about giving flex a shot, we recommend this as a starting point.

Apparently someone is clamoring for a class that we use here called "Out". This post will deliver said class, as well as provide a brief overview of its usage.

"Out" really doesn't do anything particularly useful, but it does make it a lot easier to scan through large volumes of trace() output and find the information you're looking for by formatting it nicely. This means that every line traced out is prefixed with the classname of the instance executing the trace, as well as the type of event the trace is intended to represent. There's also the option of filtering the outputs such that only traces from specific classes or of specific types are displayed.

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Way back in Performance Tips Part I, I mentioned the idea of using BitmapData to capture a dynamic "screen shot" of the movieclip when transitioning between different sections of your site/application/whatever. The idea is to render a flat bitmap -- a JPG, basically -- instead of all of those PNGs and videos and vector graphics you have floating around here.

I issued a challenge to Cathy, one of our finest designers here, to come up with something so fantastically slow that there was no way even BitmapData could save it. She did not disappoint. She's got our test beachball from the Visualizer, some rare interview footage from our elite Foosball Team, alpha PNG clouds, and on and on.

Check out the results here, or down load the demo for yourself.

Click from Josh to Caleb and back, clicking the "Capture Screenshot" button to toggle whether or not you want to generate bitmapdata of the section before transitioning or just play it out as is. When on, you should notice the transition is significantly less "chunky" in playback.

Useful!

(Via Mike Chambers.)