Flex Performance on Mobile Devices

This past weekend I spent an hour optimizing the Flex 4 scrolling demo that I posted last week. The original demo was intended to show how to hook up touch events to the Flex 4 List / DataGroup controls. This new version adds some optimizations for the touch event handling and adds the kinetic flick behavior. Check it out and let me know what you think:

I’ve posted the code for this second version of the touch scrolling demo. It was pretty trivial to optimize it this far. With a little more work it’ll be as smooth as silk and as fast as Apolo Ohno. :)

Over the past few days I’ve received some questions about the performance of Flex apps on mobile devices. My Census RIA Benchmark has been a great way to compare the performance of various data loading techniques and technologies. Now that I have my Android based Nexus One mobile device with an early build of Flash Player 10.1 I wanted to see how fast I could load and render large amounts of data in a Flex application. I’m really impressed with the results! 20,000 rows of data loaded from the server and rendered on my phone in about 2 seconds! Those 20,000 rows can then be sorted on the device instantaneously. Pretty amazing performance for such a little device! Check out the video:

You can run the mobile version of the Flex AMF Census Test and check out the source code. Let me know what you think.