Im working on a small flash game for fun and discovered some odd things when testing between platforms. I develop on a MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz dual core) but found that even though I set my target framerate to 100fps the game never achieves this, I usually get closer to 60fps. However, If I set my target framerate to 60, I get closer to 40. Somewhat odd.

I was concerned that if performance was slow on my computer It would be much worse on an older one, so I decided to test the game out on a slower PC (1.7 GHz single core) to make sure it could keep up. I was shocked to discover that it achieved an average of 98fps! Not only that but the game only used about 10-15% of the CPU, where as the game uses close to 60% of BOTH of my MacBook Pro cores.

It seems that Adobe has done one hell of a job optimizing Flash for Windows and is really lagging on the Mac end. I hope that Flash 10 will bring equal performance on each platform. At least for the time being I can rest assured knowing that if the game runs well on my computer it will run damn well on most PCs out there.

FYI, I had the latest developer debug build of Flash installed on each machine.

Cool new trick I just learned:

In iTunes if you want to show only songs with 3 stars or higher simply type *** into the search bar, **** for 4-star or better, you get the point. This can be paired with other things in the search box like “Vampire Weekend ***” which will then show all Vampire Weekend songs with three or more stars. Saves a lot of fuss creating smart playlists just for stars.

The only thing now keeping the search box from becoming perfect in my opinion would be a OR function. It really pisses me off that I can’t type in “Vampire Weekend || MGMT” to show songs from only those two bands. Who the hell uses |’s in their song titles anyways? Even better would be a way to add filters, like the new search in OS X 10.5 Leopard. Maybe one day…

Now that I’ve started complaining about iTunes I might as well mention my biggest gripe, no good way to queue songs! Winamp did this amazingly well. Say Im listening to music and wanted to listen to a particular song next. All I had to do was select that song and push ‘Q’ (or something like that). That song would then have a little ‘1′ next to it indicating that it was next up. I could continue adding songs like that to my heart content. Winamp also had a nice little quick search like Quicksilver, which allowed me to type the name of a song and push some key to queue it, which made the process even faster. iTunes does have queueing in the party shuffle, but it really sucks. It only works if I am listening to the party shuffle playlist, and if not, I have to take the time to pick my current playlist in party shuffle and then re-play the song I am currently listening to so that I can queue the next song… big pain in the ass. Also there is no quick way to search my library although I have a feeling there might be a way to do this in Quicksilver (I dont quite like the built in iTunes plugin).

If any of you know a way around these issues please let me know.