Comments on: Macromedia Central: Efficiency Rhetoric

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 19:25:35 +0000

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!

By: Erik Bianchi

Erik Bianchi — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 19:21:13 +0000

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.

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 06:33:42 +0000

Show me the SDK and I’ll grind away.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 02:57:33 +0000

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)