Core Animation and Flash Player

post from Daring Fireball on 20 February 2010 10:00:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Adobe engineer Tinic Uro on the performance improvements in the forthcoming Core Animation-capable Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X.

In his browser comparison matrices, Uro only mentions Safari (which gets the Core Animation support in Flash), Firefox (which gets Quartz 2D), and Opera (which is still getting QuickDraw). But in the comments he states that Chrome (which is already far more popular than Opera on Mac OS X) doesn’t yet support Core Animation.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html

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Samsung TL series adds RAW, 1,000FPS slow motion

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 20 February 2010 07:55:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Wrapping up Samsung's PMA news are two new TL series cameras that serve the more demanding photograp...

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http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=f559684e06a2a2c52a72b9ba9d5705ef

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Samsung pocket vidcams get 1080p, optical zoom

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 20 February 2010 07:30:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

As part of its updates for PMA, Samsung on Saturday added two new U series pocket camcorders. The H...

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http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=37983d16b3dc3ccd972e11407e37172b

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iLiveMath Winter Sports for 1st to 6th grade on
the iTunes App Store

post from on 20 February 2010 07:00:00 PM. ©

California based iHome Educator today is pleased to announce the release of iLiveMath Winter Sports[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-10940.htm

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Samsung adds two semi-tough cameras

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 20 February 2010 07:00:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Samsung held a late unveiling for multiple new cameras at PMA today, including two new semi-rugged c...

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http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=c6a08f6f0b92410db1babf90b4e84a25

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Flex 4 List Scrolling on Android With Flash
Player 10.1

post from Daring Fireball on 20 February 2010 05:05:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

“It’s a little slow.” They’re still optimizing, though.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.jamesward.com/2010/02/19/flex-4-list-scrolling-on-android-with-flash-p
layer-10-1/

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Google Deprecating Gears in Favor of HTML5

post from Daring Fireball on 20 February 2010 04:36:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Ian Fette, of Google’s Gears team:

If you’ve wondered why there haven’t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it’s because we’ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5.

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Read The Full Article:
http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html

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iPad pre-orders to start next week

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 20 February 2010 03:35:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Apple might start taking pre-orders for the iPad as soon as next week, one rumor claims today. A su...

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http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=fd23fafa5f0022815d51dfba23d4dde5

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The Whole Thing About Adobes Flash Player Not
Having Access to H.264 Hardware Acceleration on Mac OS X

Wil Shipley on Twitter, presumably in response to this (and where by “other platforms”, Shipley apparently means “Microsoft Windows”):

Hmm, @gruber ignores that Flash on other platforms can and does use hardware H.264 decoding, but Apple won?t give Adobe access.

I didn’t mention the issue yesterday, no, but I wrote a whole section about it in this piece a few weeks ago, and I specifically linked to Adobe’s own FAQ and weblog entry on the issue.

I think the issue is a red herring, spin from Adobe intended to share the blame for Flash’s Mac OS X performance with Apple. First, Flash performance gripes are not limited to H.264 video playback. Everything Flash Player does is slower on Mac OS X than Windows. What’s Adobe’s excuse for Flash’s performance on non-H.264 video?

Second, even Apple’s own QuickTime on Snow Leopard only makes use of H.264 hardware acceleration with a single graphics card: the Nvidia 9400M. If you don’t have that graphics card in your Mac, you don’t get H.264 hardware acceleration, period. That card is used across the board in current Mac hardware, including the white MacBooks and Mac Minis, but there are an awful lot of older Macs in use — a majority I’d wager — which don’t have that card.

Third, no one is complaining about the lack of hardware acceleration for other video playback software on Mac OS X, like VLC, Movist, Perian, or even (as mentioned in the previous paragraph) QuickTime itself on machines without the Nvidia 9400M. Even if we concede the point that Flash Player’s lack of access to H.264 hardware acceleration on Mac OS X inherently blocks it from matching its H.264 playback performance on Windows, I fail to understand how that blocks it from matching the performance of other video playback software on Mac OS X itself.

Lastly, does anyone really think it would be a good idea for web content plugins to have direct access to graphics card hardware? Is it absurd to think that it’s a reasonable OS design to limit plugins to higher-level APIs? Should Flash Player be a kernel extension, so that it can ensure it gets plenty of CPU cycles and have direct access to whatever hardware it wants?

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2010/02/flash_hardware_acceleration

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ShrinkIt 1.1

Free utility from Panic; losslessly shrinks PDFs by running them through Mac OS X’s built-in PDF engine. See Dan Frakes’s review at Macworld — which review, Cabel Sasser notes, is 17 words longer than the source code to ShrinkIt itself.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/02/shrinkit-1-0/

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