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I was finishing up my current project, which I will cover in my next post, and I’ve noticed one small thing that makes a huge difference. I don’t know if it was covered before, so I may be late for this, but check this out. When using FlashDevelop, which I do for almost all of my projects, selecting “Release” configuration over “Debug” one actually reduces SWF file size.

I’ve compiled my project few times, nothing was changed in the code, I was only switching between two configurations and my results are: 240567 bytes for debug configuration and 169765 bytes for release one. That’s over 1.4X SWF files size cut! And the sad thing is I was googling on how to reducing SWF file size occationally over the past few months. Turns out debugger puts a lot of junk inside the code which make file size bigger. Usually there are no reasons for production SWFs to have debugger stuff in them, so unless testing it’s best to always compile using Release config. It runs faster than debug version too.

Now I have to recompile all of my previous projects…

I’ve just downloaded and tried Alpha version of MiniBuilder and I am very impressed. MiniBuilder is an IDE written in Actionscript to develop Actionscript applications. I’m using AIR version, but it can also run online in Flash Player. Since it uses Adobe AIR runtime, it’s cross platform.

Problem I have so far is when compiling it doesn’t save unsaved files for you. Instead you have to save them all individually which is very frustrating since you can’t tell which ones are unsaved and you end up saving them all by going from tab to tab. The compiler itself (MBCompiler) has to be open manually from the application folder.

It’s still an early alpha so I’ll update my experience with MiniBuilder in the future posts.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking your time to read my blog. My name is Alex and I’m a freelance web designer/developer. To get more info about this blog and what I do visit soon to be updated about section. What I want to talk about in my first post is what tools do I use to get my projects done.

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