Having covered JPEG-XR images recently, one thing has struck me as a little odd: there aren’t really any good cross-platform viewers available to look at them. Yes, it’s a bit of an obscure format, but shouldn’t there be something available? Well, I decided to make a simple Flash app to load a JPEG-XR image from a URL or a browse button and display it. Along the way I added support for PNG, JPEG, GIF, AVM1 SWF, and AVM2 SWF. Today’s article has the source code and the viewer itself. Added support for panning the image
JPEG Compressor Roundup
Mar 4
Now that we’ve determined the best PNG compressors to create PNG images with, let’s delve into the world of JPEG compressors. As with PNG, we have multiple options to choose from in our Flash apps when we’re looking to encode images such as screenshots. Which is best? Today’s article delves into each compressor’s performance and file size efficiency.
PNG Compression Followup
Feb 25
Does the type of image matter when you’re compressing it to PNG? Does it affect performance? Size? This week’s article looks into these questions to find out how each of the PNG compressors performs on three different types of images: an icon, a photo, and random noise.
PNG Compressor Roundup
Feb 18
Flash Player has had built-in PNG compression since version 11.3. But how does it fare against all of the other PNG compressors out there? Does it compress faster? Does it produce smaller file sizes? Today’s article explores your options when it comes to compressing PNG files so you can get the fastest or smallest PNG possible.
Image Loading Performance
Feb 11
Which image format is fastest to load? That was perhaps the most relevant question in last week’s article, so it’s time to explore it more deeply. Today’s article examines differences between different types of PNG, JPEG, and JPEG-XR files to answer questions like “does the JPEG quality setting matter?” and “is indexed PNG faster than full (ARGB) PNG?” Read on for the test and all the details.
Are you using the fastest assets you can? Yes, even the file format of the assets you use has a big bearing on the performance of your app. Ask yourself: is PNG faster to decompress than JPEG? Is it faster to compress to JPEG-XR or PNG? Do the quality settings matter? Today’s article explores the performance of Flash’s main three image formats—PNG, JPEG, and JPEG-XR—to find out which decompresses fastest at load time and compresses fastest at save time.
As I discovered in the previous articles, loaded bitmaps are stored in memory in two forms: the compressed PNG, JPEG, JPEG-XR, GIF file and the uncompressed RGBA pixels. If you don’t use the pixels, Flash Player will reclaim its memory and then uncompress it if you use the bitmap later on. However, if you do plan to use the bitmap, isn’t the compressed file data just memory overhead? Today’s article will show you how to dump this unused file data and save a bunch of memory.
Keeping Bitmaps Decompressed
Jan 21
It came to my attention in the comments of Preloading Bitmap Decompression that Flash Player would actually free the decompressed bitmap memory if you didn’t make active use of it, similar to garbage collection. So if you followed my strategy from that article to preload a bitmap, it may have been un-preloaded for you by Flash Player! Today’s article shows you how to work around this little problem.
String-Sortable Integers
Jan 14
Strings and integers sort differently. Unfortunately, this became a problem for me during some recent experiments with Starling. It could be a problem for you too in a variety of situations. Today we’ll look at a workaround I’ve developed to solve this problem, which isn’t nearly as straightforward as you might think.
Spriter is a tool for creating sprite animations out of multiple images. By moving, rotating, and scaling them over a timeline you can create much more efficient 2D animations than traditional full-frame animation. While Flash animation has worked similarly for years, it’s largely incompatible with the Stage3D API that is quickly becoming mandatory to achieve adequate performance. Today’s article will show you how to use Spriter in your Stage3D-powered Flash app via a Starling and some custom classes I’ve created.
