Overview
Flash Player is coming to a SmartPhone and NetBook near you! You’ll see what’s different about the player on these low powered devices. Topics covered include what we had to do to make it faster and use much less memory, how we used hardware like the GPU and Video decoding to give it the performance you need, how the AVM2 (AS3) changed, how we handle low memory situations and more. Imagine taking the Flash Player of today and making it work on computers from 10 years ago. It’s been hard! Oh yea, I won’t forget Flash on the iPhone:)
Mobile challenges
- Current processors are built for low power consumption, not raw speed.
Lack of L2 cache (Newer processors are getting L2 caches, and are much faster).
- How do we handle video?
- GPU
The AVM2 (the AS3 Virtual Machine)
- How it’s changed.
The GC
- How it’s changed.
GPU
- Gives us a chance for fast rendering.
- Different chipsets do things differently.
Video
- Software Decoding
- Hardware Decoding – again – different chipsets do things differently.
Increasing performance and reducing memory use
- Pause and Resume
- Management of Flash Instances
How we keep the number of Flash instances on a web page at a reasonable value?
- Shut down selected Flash instances on an html page when resources get low.
Out of Memory Handling
- Graceful failure when memory gets tight.
Desktop features that will benefit.
iPhone!
- What works and what doesn’t.
- How do you author for it?
Tips for authoring for Flash Player 10 on SmartPhones
- Text
- Filters/Blend Modes, etc.
- Touch screens
- Accelerometer
- Video
- More…
