timwalling.com

Posted this in the FlashLite mailing list but thought it would be nice to get some feedback from others not on the list.

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In my J2ME reading so far I’ve seen that incorporation of an opensource obfuscator called ProGuard into the build process is fairly common. Reduction in file size being the desired side affect for many people. Obfuscating code can sometimes get you decreases in file size, I think it all depends on your coding style.

I thought I’d take a look around the web to see if there were any similar tools which may help flash lite developers optimize their apps. I’ve never been fond of the idea of running my swf’s through an obfuscation/optimization tool because I worry about the unknowns that you’re introducing. Will my app work correctly still? etc… Still I thought it was worthy of some discussion. Here are two apps I played around with a little.

ASO Lite - freeware
http://www.genable.com/aso/index.html

Comes in two forms, command line or GUI version. I ran a project I’m working on now through this just to see if I could see any reduction in file size as a side effect. Original swf was 90kb, after running through ASO it was 92kb. So in that case it didn’t help.

Flash Optimizer - commercial ($99 I believe)
http://www.flashoptimizer.com

This has a free trial so I installed it and ran the same project through it. Went from 90kb to 75kb. Very promising. This program has a ton of optimization tweaks you can customize. Not sure what it does with your code. On the site they state the following optimizations.

# Vectors optimization
# Curves optimization
# Z-buffer optimization
# Shapes optimization
# Morphing optimization
# Fonts optimization
# Zero-objects optimization

Thought it was something worth looking into. Any thoughts on the subject? Anyone play with any similar tools?