More Flash to iPhone News
Just read a great article over at Inside RIA about Flash to iPhone compilation. Some very interesting in-depth details about the interaction between the CS5 iPhone compiler and LLVM.
The gist of it seems to be that if you want your apps to run quickly then you need to employ the usual optimisation tricks, plus a few new ones specific to the iPhone environment. Of course, since the target environment is a low CPU, low memory device (compared to your typical desktop or laptop computer), you need to be extra careful to optimise your applications.
Some general gotchas to watch out for:
- Allocating new blocks of memory on the iPhone is particularly expensive. Reuse objects as much as possible to avoid object creation. If you’re nullifying an object, could it be added to a redundant object pool instead? Object pooling and up-front object creation can save you valuable processor cycles at runtime.
- Watch what’s on the display list. Since AS3 it’s been important to make that that you haven’t just made your objects invisible, you’ve actually removed them from the display list too. This is even more apparent on the iPhone, where processor cycles and memory are limited.
- Watch out with the drawing API. It runs slowly on the iPhone, and you’re better off dealing with loaded bitmaps.
- PixelBender is a no-no.
While we’re at it, another couple of interesting articles from Inside RIA about Flash and the iPhone:
Definitely interesting reading.