Thanks to a brief, though, informative response to this question on the Adobe AIR forums, I've been told that when I instantiate a Spark List and assign it a custom item renderer and a data provider, that the reason it instantiates four item renderers (one for each item in my DataProvider), that properly are contextual children of the List control, and then instantiates a fifth orphaned instance of the renderer is 'for measurement'.
I assume the answer I was given is correct, but the reality (not the answer) is distinctly distasteful and unsatisfying. In a day and age when we are trying to optimize programs to run on what are, frankly, the technological equivalent of 15-20 year old computers (1ghz processors and limited RAM) with end users expecting them to behave in a snappy non-latent manner as they would on a desktop machine with multi-multi-gHz cores, several GB of memory, and a GPU handling a lot of the load (as unrealistic as that may be... ...one of the major reasons I believe Adobe gave up on a mobile browser flash player), I cannot understand why something that seems so very wasteful is necessary. I don't pretend to understand the nuts and bolts of how the SDK accomplishes what it does... that's why it's an Abstract. I usually don't need to know... But I'm faced with a situation where I'm trying to understand why when I instantiate a view it basically halts an iPad2 for 11-13 seconds before displaying the new view... and when I investigate, I find that the processor intensive task I'm trying to complete is made that much more intensive by a factor of 20%. If I'm to believe my trace statements, the creationComplete event is being called on legitimate items 1, 2, 3, and 4, which, I would believe would make them available to be measured and do layout, starting with the first, and made all the more simple because my List has been told to use uniform row height... (which I assume means, 'figure out the first and go with it'). Very grateful for any insight... Especially if it would mean also having a way to help my extreme latency problem. I cannot even get a BusyIndicator to display and rotate before loading the view w/o using a timer to load the view after a brief time... and then it freezes the BusyIndicator. Frustrating... very frustrating. -- // Christian M. Cepel - Programmer/Analyst, Sr., University of Missouri *And the wrens have returned, and are nesting;* *In the hollow of that oak, where his heart once had been.* *And he lifts up his arms in a blessing, for being born again.* Rich Mullins, The Color Green, A Liturgy, a Legacy, & a Ragamuffin Band
