Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Flex, AR and speed improvement

I am working on an AR project for a client when I ran into major performance issues.  It drove me batty because I tested out a bunch of stuff and couldn't get the performance up.  For starters, I am using a dae file (standard stuff), then I load it in using collada, and that's where the crap started bottoming out.  I tried multiple ways to fix it, testing whether it was my app, the dae, the AR, or what!  I even connected w/ ARToolworks and Eric Socolofsky.  They made some suggestions, like using Windows to take advantage of FP10.1.5's newest drivers which are great on the graphics card (but don't help me because I'm on a Mac).  Instead, after countless hours and angry griping, I happened upon a small discovery, the rendering engine in Papervision.  This little sucker is rendering my dae and making my 3D model work.  Well, it was using Quadrant, which was eating up about every resource to make my model look nice and smooth.  Once I switched that to Lazy, I got a huge performance boost (going from 1-2 fps up to 10-11 fps).

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Who works in a corporate environment and is allowed to use FB4 yet?

FB4 - oh how I pine for you!

Actually, I wanted to create my latest project in FB4, utilizing the pleasures of the vector class in FP10, but alas, my compatriots managed to convince me that the upgrade isn't necessary yet. 


Is there anyone out there who's corporate policy is banning them from using the beta product to develop apps?  If they do, how do you get to play (aside from on your own time?)

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Dreamweaver and CS4 killing performance

Is Dreamweaver running slow for anyone else who does Flex development.  I'm not on a great machine, but I'm running a MacBook 13" w/ a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, and 2 GB of Ram, but I do love my MacBook, and get quite frustrated by the fact that when I open up most of my CS4 products, my computer can come to a grinding halt.  Actually, it's mostly just Dreamweaver, which I'm using for reading, writing and editing C#.  I've thought about running my XP partition, then running visual studio for the coding, but that'd take up just about as much resources as me running Dreamweaver.  What I don't understand (and maybe it comes from being spoiled by a wonderful Eclipse community), but why is Dreamweaver so unwieldily and ugly and hard to use?  I'm happy that I can edit multiple languages with it, but frankly, I would've been happier if netBeans or even Eclipse let me work on it.  It's annoying!  But regardless, I'm trying to figure out what is killing my cpu?  I do know and have configured my Eclipse for larger memory management (I believe I set the min at 84, and the max at 1024), but I'm almost never using all of that.  Aside from a few smaller apps (read: iTunes, Adium, Thunderbird), I'm at a loss for such inefficiency.