Peter Vullings's blog

A large overhead when developing in AS3 (or any language for that matter) is the creation and disposal of objects.  Each time this happens the system needs to allocate memory for that object (or deallocate memory), and this takes time and processor overhead.

 We have created a tool to help compile Adobe AIR projects for iOS (Android coming soon) with the ADT.  It reproduces the functionallity (plus more) of the export dialogs within Adobe CS5.
 
Disclaimer:  this software is provided as-is with no gaurantees whatsoever.  It is in pre-alpha mode, and not all features are implemented yet.  Download and/or use this software at your own risk.  We have created this for our own use internally, but are providing it to the community so that other people may benefit also.

Continuing our popular Facebook stats reports, here are the Facebook stats for New Zealand, Australia and USA as of today (22 Feb 2011).
 
Trends

On a diversion while porting Mr Ice Cream to iPhone, I created a quick benchmarking app to test the performance of AS3 bitmap sprites on iPhone.  The results are very bizarre - I would welcome any feedback on why I might be seeing these results.
 
What we get is a wildly fluctuating framerate (choppy, varying, whatever you want to call it), so that even if the average frame rate is reported as 25fps, the framerate will fluctuate rapidly between 12 and 60.  This is only evident when using the CPU.
 

Give them games!
 
Nielsen reports in a recent study on the online habits of Americans that online gaming has overtaken personal email as the second most popular thing to do online (after social networking).

Figure sourced and © Nielsen
 

How cool is our studio/office?

We're in a converted 1920's model dairy factory. 'Model' as in it was used to represent how a dairy factory should be built and operated, rather than as a commercial enterprise.  It was attached to Massey University, just across the road - oh, it makes sense now!

This is our corner of it.

Click for larger image