Simon Heys
Screensavr: dead-end, new beginning
So I have reach a dead-end in Flash. I now have a Screensavr that works perfectly, honouring all image proportions. Looks great, but runs slowly in Flash as it can’t handle so many individual images as the bitmap processing isn’t sophisticated enough; had to make it so that each row is a series of MovieClips rather than one BitmapData object. Setting cacheAsBitmap was causing too much flickering; turning it off makes it run too slow.
Unless there’s a major brainwave, a Cocoa rewrite is on the cards. This could take some time…
4 February 2007 in ActionScript, Screensaver
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You tried setting the movie _quality to low? I find it work’s a treat on this kinda stuff.
Yes I did try that. Has the comedy side-effect of making the image scaling worse (though I guess I could just temporarily set _quality when I’m scaling an image). I might try a few more Flash tricks but I’m pretty set on a rewrite in a proper language.
I’ll mail you the files so you can try this out on your PC; maybe it’s just slow on my 5-year-old mac…
I can’t get this to work at all, keep getting ‘error code: 102′ :(
Hi Ally - sorry it’s not working for you - it’s proving quite difficult! Not sure what that error means - I have mailed you and we’ll see if I can fix it.
I am going to completely rewrite it from scratch anyway and hope to have a much better version in the next few weeks.
Hi Simon, why don’t you do this in java / processing? You could use the flickrj library on SourceForge??
Hi Si! Log time no see! Hope you’re well.
I must admit I didn’t even think of doing this with Java - I guess because I just haven’t used it in such a long time. Is there a way to make screensavers with it? It would be pretty easy to convert I guess as a lot of the code will just copy-and-paste.
Anyways I’m about 75% of the way to a native Mac version - runs lovely so far.
Stay tuned…
Yeah I’m doing well, been keeping my head down :)
I haven’t seen a java screensaver maker for a long, long time! You could make it in java then wrap it in cocoa?
The new version is ready!