Optimizing content for performance and memory

To optimize your Flash content, you must pay attention to basic principles. For example, Flash developers have often had to avoid extremely complex artwork, excessive tweening, and overusing transparency.

Although earlier versions of Flash have resolved most of these performance issues for the desktop, Adobe Flash Lite developers still face additional challenges due to limitations of mobile devices: some devices perform better than others, sometimes dramatically, and because mobile authoring often requires publishing to many different devices, developers must sometimes author for the lowest common denominator.

Optimizing mobile content often requires making trade-offs. For example, one technique might look better, while another results in better performance. As you measure these trade-offs, you will be going back and forth repeatedly between testing in the emulator and testing on the target device.

In Flash 8, the emulator for Flash Lite 2.x was part of the Flash authoring environment. Beginning in Flash CS3 and Flash Lite 3.0, the emulator functionality is part of Adobe® Device Central. Device Central lets you emulate your Flash Lite projects on a variety of devices, and can emulate device display, memory use, and performance on specific devices. For complete information about using the emulator to optimize your Flash Lite content for mobile devices, see “Best practices for content on mobile devices” in the Device Central documentation.