Tricks for tween on mobile devices with Flash Platform

In this quick post I’d like to share with you my experience about Tween on Flash Platform projects delivered on a mobile devices.
I started work on mobile since Flash Lite 1.1 so I grew up with mobile, I lived all the Flash mobile evolution and now, on tablet and smartphone, I had some good tricks to share with you, I really hope that those tips could help you during your developer life.
OK, let’s start:

  • Use quality property of stage
    This is a really good technique to use when you have to improve performance of your project, when you need to make a fluid tween before launch it, set stage quality to low and when tween will finish set stage quality to high or best.
    Avoid to use this technique when you have vectors (textfield for example) on the stage because you could have a worst result.
  • Use cacheAsBitmap and cacheAsBitmapMatrix
    If you have vector object that you’d like to animate in your project remember to cache them and then animate; remember also to set your application with GPU acceleration and you can see a really good performance with this technique.
    Avoid to cache objects that you need to remove from display list, it will be so expensive for your memory.
  • System.gc() works!
    I tried in few sample to use it on Android and I saw a good result, so the “old” tip to call System.gc() twice in a try/catch statement works on mobile device too (only on AIR apps)
  • Take care with multiple animations on iPad and iPhone
    On iOS devices we don’t have AIR runtime so LLVM translate our AIR project for us in Native Binary so it could help if you move few objects per time in particular if you have big objects to move like a background or something like that
  • Greensocks tweens are the best
    I tried tweener and other tween libraries for AS3, but the best one for me are the Greensock tween library, in particular on iOS devices.
  • Last but not least, remember to test your animation on the device because you could see “funny” results
    Sometimes happen that on your computer everything works well but when you port your content on a tablet or smartphone everything works not so well.
    Before hurt your head, remember to test a lots of times your mobile content on the device, it could save your projects!
Finally I suggest to take a look at dev center mobile development zone of Adobe site because you can find many tutorials and helpful tips on mobile development.
That’s all folks for now, I hope you enjoy those tips.

Published by

luca mezzalira

Being associated with the industry since 2004, I have lent my expertise predominantly in the solution architecture field. I have gained accolades for revolutionising the scalability of frontend architectures with micro-frontends, from increasing the efficiency of workflows, to delivering quality in products. My colleagues know me as an excellent communicator who believes in using an interactive approach for understanding and solving problems of varied scopes. I helped DAZN becoming a global streaming platform in just 5 years, now as Principal Architect at AWS, I'm helping our customers in the media and entertainment space to deliver cost-effective and scalable cloud solutions. Moreover, I'm sharing with the community the best practices to develop cloud-native architectures solving technical and organizational challenges. My core industry knowledge has been instrumental in resolving complex architectural and integration challenges. Working within the scopes of a plethora of technical roles such as tech lead, solutions architect and CTO, I have developed a precise understanding of various technicalities which has helped me in maximizing value of my company and products in my current leadership roles.

7 thoughts on “Tricks for tween on mobile devices with Flash Platform”

  1. Pingback: Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 8/11/2011 | Remote Synthesis

  2. I suggest you to use TweenNano , and if you tween Bitmap, set cahceAsBitamp to false, thween and set it back to true.

    Reply

  4. I’m coding my first Flash app for iOS. I’ve implemented all these suggestions and it has certainly made a huge difference. However, in my app I have several panels I slide in one by one on button button press. The strange thing is that when I move a panel for the first time it drops in frame rate. Once the panel has been on screen once it will move smoothly the next time around. Do you know what this could be? I’ve cached them as Bitmaps, I’m using GreenStock’s Tweens, I even load all the panels and then put them off screen and invisible.

    Thanks

    Reply

    1. Just another clue – once the panels have loaded and I press the buttons repeatedly everything runs smoothly. If I wait 5 seconds between presses they move in a choppy fashion. ???

      Reply

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