Richard Olsson Freelance Flash developer

For anyone who might be listening (reading) I just wanted to come back to my blog real quick and tell the world that we released the first version of Away3D Lite today. In brief, it's a lighter version of Away3D, which also runs at light speed. Check it out in full at Away3D.com!

Is Twitter like totally 2008? Well, in that case I'm just not very hip, because I just started twittering (twitting? tweeting?)

Now, when I've got too much work to do to write any real blog posts, at least I'll be posting some stuff (about life, Flash and Away3D) on http://twitter.com/richardolsson.

I just logged in and noticed my user was registered 52 weeks ago. I guess that means the blog is now one year old. During it's second year, it will get some new clothes, I promise, and also some proper attention from daddy.

The second (or third) and last day of FITC Amsterdam was just as good as the first (or second?) I actually had to spend some time working in the foyer instead of attending all the sessions. But here are some of the highlights anyway...

So I'm back at my hotel room after yet another FITC evening event, which for this night meant going on a boat trip with a "party boat." Pretty cool stuff. The coolest thing today was probably all the new acquaintances, and the sessions. Here's what I've been up to.

I just got back to my hotel room from the opening party (and some club afterwards) for the FITC conference in Amsterdam. I'm too tired to write a long post about the entire day, but I'm liking the city and it has been nice to meet up with Rob and the others from the Away3D team to chat about what we'll be doing with the engine in the near future.

I'll post again tomorrow when the conference has actually started and I have attended some sessions. By the way, the "day zero" thing is not a programmer's joke, it's just that day one is really tomorrow. :)

Today the team released Away3D version 2.3, which holds a lot of juicy features in it's treasure chest. I can't really claim any credit for this release, as I've been so swamped in other work I basically haven't contributed a thing for the last two months. But on a day like this, it really rules to be a part of this awesome team.

Go check out the new release and get the source code through Google code. Very well, back to work on the next release!

I just read over at Ted Patrick's blog that Adobe announced a 55% market penetration for Flash Player 10, at MAX Japan, Wednesday. Those are really good numbers for us who long to be able to target Flash Player 10 in real life productions.

Flash 10 of course is wicked cool (and so is CS4 -- I just upgraded this week.) Over at Away3D, the team is working hard on a version that's able to squeeze the most out of the new player features. I wish I'd be able to take more credit though, but this blog isn't the only thing that's been suffering as I've recently been buried in work.

In my 2008 round-up article, I said that one of my "hopes and resolutions" for 2009 was to attend some international conferences and festivals. I just got confirmation on my FITC ticket purchase, so I can now happily check off the first of my resolutions, and say, see you in Amsterdam!

Be sure not to miss Rob's presentation on some Away3D coolness.

After having used a previously described OR operator trick in the Away3D code, it suddenly hit me that it might inflict a performance issue. My reasoning was that being dynamically typed, the || operator might not be as fast as using if statements, which, on a low level, should simply be comparing two pointers. (If pointers are unfamiliar to you, they are basically a C/C++ data type, variables of which contain an integer RAM address to where a variable is found. Comparing two pointers does not compare the variable data at said RAM offset, but rather the offset integers themselves.)

How surprised (and pleased) was I to find quite the opposite: The OR operator actually even out-performs the if statement equivalence! Read on.