Simulate Your Flash Content’s Download

Here’s a common challenge you may encounter in Flash development: You’ve finished up your first version of the Flash movie, and you’ve realized that, well, it’s kind of big. Maybe too big? Maybe even so big that people will click away before it finishes loading. Fear not! You can check on just how long your Flash content will take to load using the “Bandwidth Profiler” and the “Simulate Download” functions.

From the “Control” menu, choose “Test Movie” (shortcut is command+Enter on Mac / ctrl+Enter on Windows)—this will render the movie into a SWF in a new window. Once that’s complete, from the “View” menu, choose “Bandwidth Profiler” (command+B on Mac / ctrl+B on Windows), which will change the view of this temporary SWF into a 3-panel state, showing info about the movie in the top left, a barline on the right, and your movie itself in the bottom panel.

Choosing “Simulate Download” from the “View” menu (which now has taken over the command+Enter / ctrl+Enter shortcut) will do just that. The “Download Settings” submenu in the “View” menu will allow you to adjust for a wide variety of possible download speeds.

In this way, you can check and see just how long that movie you made takes to load. If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that web surfers will click away if the content they want to view doesn’t load quickly—it makes sense that most clients seek out freelance designers who can help make sure their readers stay engaged.

Tags: cheat-sheet, flash

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Design Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.