Improve file size with Reducer
Post a new comment
You need to be logged in in order to post a comment. Please click here to go login and be redirected to the post form.
Flash Juggler Blog
- Parse XML data to a List Component - FLASH CS3 AS3 Mon Apr 26, 2010, by FlashReseller
- Kevin Lynch Sneaks New Features in CS5 Sat Apr 10, 2010, by Alex
Joa Ebert has been on a quest to build a better ActionScript compiler and to produce even more optimized SWF files.
By diving deep into the low level bytecode of SWF files and deconstructing this, Joa has come up with several ways to optimize SWFs on a low level. In the process he's worked on opening up the special opcodes that Alchemy gets it's speed from to the general Flash programming community. The result is a small Java command line tool that'll fix a limitation of the Flex compiler.
If you use the Flash IDE to export PNG files with transparency, you can also set the file to compress as JPG to save file size (rather than the lossless PNG compression). If you are using Flex Builder, FDT or another tool that embed PNGs as assets using the Embed-tag, you won't get this compression. By just running Joa's Reducer tool, you can apply any level of compression to all the PNGs in a SWF and since it's Java based, it should be possible to add this to an automated build system as well. Check it out!
Note this this will only work on lossless images and that Java 1.6 SE is required. We're really looking forward to Joa's further experimentation and what may come from that!