This is one of the most prevalent misperceptions associated with Flash. Basically, the myth is that Flash uses an inordinate amount of CPU compared to other, similar technologies. Before looking in more detail at this misperception, I think it is important to point out that when one makes the statement “Flash is a CPU hog”, they are making a comparison of Flash CPU usage to some baseline. This then begs the question: Flash uses a lot of CPU compared to what?

A little over a week ago Apple released a new draft of their iPhone developer program license which contained the following clause: 3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.

I have just posted information about FlashCamp San Francisco, a free developer / designers event that we will be holding in the Adobe San Francisco Office on Friday night, April 16th. This will be similar to the other world wide FlashCamps going on this spring, with this event focusing on Flash Player 10.1, Flash CS5, Flash Builder and Flash mobile development. Register for FlashCamp San Francisco From the event page:

There has been a lot of buzz in the mobile space lately, and I suspect there will be even more around Windows Phone 7 at next week’s Microsoft Mix conference. One thing I wanted to clarify as it may have been lost in some of the other news is that Adobe and Microsoft are working together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series.

Two of the things that Flash is often criticized for is that it: Uses too much CPU Performs significantly worse on the Mac than on Windows This got me thinking about whether some quick tests would bear this out, and if so, whether it was isolated to just Flash content. Below are some raw numbers showing CPU usage of various rich content across different browsers and operating systems. This includes video deployed via HTML 5, JavaScript / Canvas animations, Flash Video, and Flash animations.

Here are my slides from my FITC Amsterdam talk titled Building High Performance iPhone Applications with ActionScript 3 . Sorry I ran a little short of time, but you can find all of the info in the slides. Here is the link to the Simple Game Framework which I discussed during the session.

In response to my post on Mouse Events and hover in Flash Player content on touch devices, John Gruber raises an issue: The problem, though, for a hypothetic Flash plugin that renders pages within web pages (as on traditional desktop browsers), is how to tell whether a tap-and-drag within a Flash element is supposed to scroll the entire web page or be passed as a mouse movement event to the Flash element.

So, the Interwebs is all a buzz again around the latest article that “proves” that Flash will not be useful on mobile devices (much less the iPad). From the article: Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware. That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.

Sorry for the two month hiatus on posting. I was on a sabbatical and vacation from work for the last 6 weeks of 2009, and have spent the first couple of weeks of 2010 busy working on code, and preparing some events for the spring (more on that in another post). Some of the stuff I have continued to spend a lot of time working on, has been building iPhone content using the Flash CS5 private beta.

Here are my slides from my FITC Edmonton talk titled Building iPhone Applications with Flash CS5. You can download the slides from here. (PDF). Btw, really great conference and vibe, and the speaker list was simply amazing. Congrats to Shawn and the FITC crew for putting on another great event.