boostworthyisryantaylor

A lot of you have been asking about the massive project I have been leading up at Schematic the past six months or so and I haven’t been able to say much about it. Well, the PGA Tour finally went public with some details about the application:

http://www.pgatour.com/2008/r/01/25/tourcast/index.html

It’s a beastly Flex application that features some pretty awesome components that convert 3D shot data into 2D shot plots over hole imagery, shot meters, graphs, tons of stats, and more. I’ll definitely go into more specifics when the application goes public in March, but I just wanted to share some of this with you now because it is pretty exciting stuff.

When working with the Flex framework, one of the more important limitations to understand is what you can and cannot add to the display using 'addChild'. Flex is a very event-oriented architecture, meaning that almost everything is triggered via events. To achieve this type of control, the lowest-level DisplayObject you can work with is a UIComponent. In simple applications, this is not a big deal; however in more aggressive applications, this can become a real performance issue due to all of the added logic that surrounds the Flex display types.

I am currently working on a very complex application at Schematic in which I ran into some very big performance issues for this very reason. My solution was to bypass the Flex framework altogether, resulting in some pretty big performance gains. To maximize this, first you must gain access to the 'mx_internal' namespace.

Next, add a 'UIComponent' to your MXML so you can try this out for yourself.

Now, in your code, create a Sprite and draw in it using the graphics container or whatever you want to do to give it a visual representation. This next step is where the magic happens. Instead of calling 'addChild', call '$addChild'.

The '$addChild' method is hidden by the 'mx_internal' namespace and gives you direct access to the DisplayObjectContainer. Doing so avoids additional operations that typically occur when using the standard 'addChild' method. I wouldn't recommend doing this for all of your DisplayObjects; obviously that would ruin the point of using Flex. If you are having performance issues though, this step along with the use of Sprites instead of UIComponents can make a pretty big difference.

2007 has come to an end, and it was a good year indeed - not only for me personally, but for our industry as well. With the new year upon us, it is time to start thinking about what 2008 will ultimately mean for you as an individual.

For me, it is starting off as a very busy one with projects carrying over from last year. Once things settle down in the Spring, I would really love to revisit my Flash roots. I started off in Flash doing code-powered graphical experiments, inspired by the likes of John Maeda, Jared Tarbell, and Yugo Nakamura. Since then, I have traveled down the long road of application architecture. It has been a fun, knowledge-packed trip; however I truly miss what got me into all of this in the first place - a fine blend of art, code, and math. Beyond experimentation in AS3, I would also like to get back into shader scripting and Processing. I haven't done a personal project in After Effects in quite some time; add that to the list as well.

Offline, I have slowly but surely been discovering my passion for photography. I would like to invest in some new lenses this year and travel to someplace really amazing; maybe the Redwood Forest. I would also like to try my hand at music. I really like electronic/synth, so maybe a keyboard would be a good start. Scott Hansen is really my inspiration for this one; not only does he make amazing music, but he is also one of my favorite artists.

The clock is ticking, so it's time to get busy. Cheers to a new year and all of the ups and downs that it may bring. What does 2008 mean to you?