TOKI WOKI. 

This post is a techy one, so if you don’t write AIR apps or if you think this wouldn’t be enough to show off dur­ing cof­fee break I rec­om­mend some­thing fun­nier.

Work­ing on a big fat AIR app (more than 400 Mb) I noticed some­thing quite strange: using Encrypt­ed­Lo­cal­Store get/setItem meth­ods hap­pened to be slow, I mean very slow, but like, slow as hell (like 5 to 10 sec­onds per call) but only after launch­ing the app, and not after. Some­thing that I never noticed before ; nei­ther with other AIR apps, nor for this one before I added its heavy con­tent… And the tricky part is that it only occurred with a com­piled app, but not within ADL.

I googled a bit and found this thread which is mainly about the strongly­Bound para­me­ter for setItem, but its last post by Oliver Gold­man rang my bell:

The first time ELS is accessed the application’s sig­na­ture needs to be ver­i­fied, regard­less of whether or not strongly­Bound is set. If strongly­Bound is set, then the sig­na­ture is re-verified as the appli­ca­tion is run­ning. Either way, it’s expen­sive if you have a big application.

Small app: fast, fat app: slow as hell. Les­son learned…

And this is true both for Flash and HTML/JS AIR apps. So if you don’t need your data to be encrypted I highly rec­om­mend using Share­dOb­ject (or else) instead. As far as I’m con­cerned the first calls dropped from 5/10 sec­onds to a few milliseconds.

Bingo.

It took time, but it’s finally here! This time every­thing is live, not pre-recorded track play­ing as back­ground, so it might be a lit­tle out-tempo at times… Still practicing!

Dur­ing the last cou­ple of months I’ve been work­ing on a free AIR app for a French community-based site called Weecast. Its pur­pose is to allow users to sub­mit and/or buy screen­casts about your favorite apps and lan­guages (mostly Adobe’s and Microsoft’s, but also 3D ones’, OS’s and more).

Intro­duc­ing the Weecast Player!

The app allows you to browse your videos, watch them (4 view modes), search for more, drop com­ments and stars… I think that’s called an RIA, right? There’s also an offline mode, so you can access all your stuff anytime.

All of this is made in Flex+AIR. The visual iden­tity was made by Weecast ; thanks for the PNGs, folks!

By the way, some parts of it are actu­ally Open­Source, includ­ing:

• Mis­cel­la­neous AIR util­i­ties
• The infa­mous Gra­di­ent­La­bel (for Flex)
• Dynam.ize and BaseOb­ject, for work­ing with syn­chro­nous SQLite databases

If you don’t know Weecast yet I highly rec­om­mend you go visit their site, grab an account and the player, enjoy free videos, and then buy some! Now if you don’t under­stand French… Well, learn it!

I shot a Coke bot­tle found in Ethiopia (with Coca-Cola, writ­ten on it in Amharic) and my street where some film scenes have been made these days… I just thought the col­ors matched.

I made some cook­ies, yummy!