Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Chapter 19. Best Practices for Development

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

—Albert Einstein

Best practices and optimization are popular topics, especially with today’s focus on mobile development. Rather than trying to cover everything in this chapter, I will point you to some good resources and limit the text to a few key points and some less frequently discussed topics.

If you are reading this, you are already a committed developer who spends time doing research. Understanding the mechanics of the AIR runtime and the ActionScript APIs will empower you as a coder both in quality and in speed, not to mention in marketability in the workplace and in popularity among your peers.

Resources on Optimization

In a document titled “Application Design Goals,” Google provides objectives with three areas of focus: performance, responsiveness, and seamlessness. It also provides a short list of recommendations: don’t drop data, don’t interrupt the user, design your UI to work with multiple screen resolutions, assume the network is slow, don’t assume the touchscreen or keyboard exists (i.e., write logic to detect them), and conserve the device’s battery. Even though this document is targeted at Android development, it is insightful to ActionScript developers as well. Read it at http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/design/index.html.

Adobe offers a white paper titled “Optimizing Performance for the Flash Platform” with a special focus on mobile. It is a 90-page document ...