Adobe Air - Improve startup time

Question

I'm building an Adobe Air 2.5. desktop application with Flash CS 5. The apps filesize is 10 MB with a medium amount of movieclips, vector graphics, bitmaps and code in it. It takes around 8 seconds from clicking the desktop icon until the app is available to work with.

How to improve the startup time?

Thanks. Uli

It's just 10MB. On launching it does setting up the stage, adding event listener to buttons, reading user preferences from an encrypted local storage and adding text to textfields from JSON. How much is the apps file size responsible for the startup time? — Uli
I removed the Flex tag; as you are probably not using Flex is you're using Flash Pro to build your app. In web based apps, I have seen dramatically quicker startup times by not embedding assets inside it; however in an AIR app I do not think that would be an issue; as the user doesn't have to download the app each time. — JeffryHouser
Are you doing all the object/UI creation at the first frame ? — Adrian Pirvulescu
Yes, I'm doing all the object/UI creation at the first frame. — Uli

Mihai Raulea Mihai Raulea · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-07T16:24:19

I think that you can decrease load time by placing on stage strictly what you need to show when the app starts.You can draw the rest of the assets upon request, dynamically. So don't just drag everything on-stage.Instead, instantiate and addChild() as needed. Depending on the asset size, it might take a little time to load, but cetainly the user won't have to wait 10 seconds before he/she can use your app. Maybe not all of your app's content will be viewed in every single session, so why put everything on stage from the beggining?

Adobe Air - Improve startup time

1 Answers