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.

I have been shying away from using Google contacts despite how nice it would be to have my contacts online. The main reason being that I didn’t want to maintain a contact list that wouldn’t sync with my phone, and I was scared of having all my information stuck in one proprietary system. Not anymore.

Im excited to see what applications will start using the API, specifically I am looking forward to a Apple Address Book sync so I can sync Gmail contacts with my iPhone. Another cool application would be one that allows syncing between corporate Google Apps accounts, that way two co-workers could share a common pool of contacts.

More info: http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-2-1-contact-api-has-landed.html