Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff05: day one

At the moment, I’m sitting in a conference room at the Flash Forward conference in New York. The current session is about object-oriented programming, which I’m pretty fuzzy on, but I want to learn more about. However, the presenter lost me about 20 minutes ago when he told the crowd, “Polymorphism is a good thing to use. So you should do that.” So. Yeah.

It’s been a hit-or-miss day so far. The opening session didn’t do a whole lot for me, although I was impressed by the presenter’s energy level for nine in the morning.

I did get some good tips from Branden Hall’s ActionScript session, particularly with respect to optimizing code. Highlights:

• If you’re doing a “for” loop, and the number of iterations depends on another property, say the length of a particular array, use a variable to represent that value. Otherwise, Flash will have to re-process the length of that array, even if the value hasn’t changed. So instead of

  for (var i:Number = 0; i < myArray.length; i++) {
  //
  }

  use:

  var max:Number = myArray.length;
  for (var i:Number = 0; i < max; i++) {
  //
  }

• Find a balance between raster and vector graphics. Raster images may be less processor-intensive than complicated vector graphics — but may also inflate your file size.
• Set the “_visible” state to “false” for objects that aren’t needed.

Afterward, Peter Hall’s session on optimizing Flash graphics for direct linking and search engine optimization offered an intriguing solution: Build a very basic HTML site that automatically redirects to particular areas of the Flash movie, and then the Flash movie, in turn, parses those referrer HTML files, the schema set up by an XML file linked within the header of the HTML.. (Complicated to explain, but interesting nonetheless.)

I also stumbled into Amit Pitaru’s session about Processing, a Java-based system to create multimedia. (I meant to go to one about Flash game development, but ended up in the wrong conference room.) Pitaru offered a really cool example in which a row of animated hairs on the screen looked like they’d been hit by a gust of wind as he blew into the microphone on his laptop. I’ll have to poke around and see if I can find it online someplace.