Tag Archives: Hardware Acceleration

YouView – Smart TV UI

YouView is a Smart TV service in the UK, which runs on Set Top Boxes and Smart TVs. I worked on the original UI for years and thought I’d share some insights into best practices for building applications on such resource constrained devices.

Continue reading YouView – Smart TV UI

Boosting Unity performance on mobile devices




Mobile devices are becoming more and more powerful. However, not all your users will have high-end mobile devices, so you should keep a low-powered device handy for testing the performance of your games.

Here are 10 ways not usually mentioned on how to improve mobile Unity performance. The usual advice (use low-poly models, minimal lights, few effect, etc) is good. But if you still need need to increase performance, try these tricks: Continue reading Boosting Unity performance on mobile devices

Sneaky tricks for developing on small devices: ‘Bitmap Folding’

One of the most problematic constraints when developing applications for resource constrained devices, such as mobile or Set Top Box is ‘video memory’.

You often will not have control over how much video memory is allocated to your application, or what the fallback behaviour is when your application uses too much. Continue reading Sneaky tricks for developing on small devices: ‘Bitmap Folding’

CODING WRONGS – Where do I start with the bad?

It gets scary out there sometimes. During my freelance career I’ve worked at a lot of different companies and have seen such coding horrors as you cannot imagine. So I thought I’d start immortalising some of them – so that we can all learn better coding practices, by looking at the bad.

Starter for 10 – What’s wrong with this picture?

public function doSomething(stuff:String):void
{
	var newPixels:BitmapData = new BitmapData(someUint, someUint, true, 0);
	someBlitUtil.blitStuffTo(newPixels, stuff);
	someBitmap.bitmapData = newPixels;
}

Did you spot the fubar? It’s not an obvious one. Continue reading CODING WRONGS – Where do I start with the bad?