Reading <a href=”http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/jd_forum/jd027.html”>JD’s article</a> on <a href=”http://www.macromedia.com”>MM’s site</a> about Macromedia Central. Something that I thought, to me, was the most interesting thing of the article was the section titled <b>Playing nice with other apps</b> on his questions section. There is a quote in that paragraph talking about how your movie could run slow because of another movie taking all the resources (120fps, for loops running in a 0 millsecond interval with updateAfterEvent).
“…The ‘politeness’ of the first year’s tools may have a big effect on how popular the overall technology becomes…”
A ton of opinions…
Good stuff, Jesse, thanks… if popup ads had appeared when browsers started, who knows how people would have reacted.
For “play nice” I’m not so much concerned with cycle-hogging from a foreground app… if you’re playing a game, then that’s foreground, and it should get the cycles. But you know how it is today in a browser if you bring another window to the front… a cycle-hogging background app can interfere with the new current foreground app. Unlike a browser, Central focuses on a single task at a time, but there are also panel/dock applets available, as well as “headless SWFs” (agents that can work in the background to periodically pull fresh data, eg)… if those types of things are hoggy then they can affect the experience of other tools.
Rephrased, it’s possible to use cycle-intensive stuff appropriately, but the *inappropriate* use of cycle-hogging coding can have an effect here. I’m not sure how this will manifest in the betas, but I know folks on the team have been looking at a couple of different ways to provide feedback about potential rogue apps.
I’m glad you’re into this… tear into it! 8)
jd
Show me the SDK and I’ll grind away.
Hey Jesse and JD. What I think would be nice here is to have an event a developer can listen for I.e. Stage.onFocus/Stage.onKillFocus.
I’ve noticed that when you have a really hard loop going on everything on the system starts to crawl. If this goes on for to long (15 seconds right?) then we get that nice little “A script in the Player is running too slow” message. While that message is open the system responds fine. It be sweet if we could call that “freeze” method without launching the message window ourselves.
So with the focus events and the “freeze” we could handle background/foreground issues ourselves.
Basically like a “Pause” function in a video game. I concur, that would be tight as hell. Additionally, it’d sure make my games’ pause functions easier to make!