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| 12-27-08 / 12:36 AM : Lucky Luke The Man of Washington on iPhone (cjed) |
| Aquafadas, the editor of the famous Angouleme for iPhone (an application that allows interactive playing of comics through the Ave!Comics technology, and downloadable for free with comics samples pages), provides Lucky Luke The man of Washington on the AppStore (47 pages, 4,99 euros). |
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| 12-20-08 / 12:25 AM : ITMS : 12 days of gifts (cjed) |
| Apple will offer from December, 26 to January, 6 free songs (singles, live) and videos (video clips, TV shows) at the iTUnes store. As previously, an iTunes account is required. |
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| 12-18-08 / 10:32 PM : Tutorial : install OSX on PC through EFI-X key (cjed) |
| The site materielBoys.fr provides a step by step guide about installing OSX on a regular PC through the EFI-X USB key (150$). The only problem encountered was the video quality while playing movies with the DVD Player, however it doesn't seem to affect all graphics cards. |
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| 12-18-08 / 10:17 PM : Apple Special event for Macintosh 25th Anniversary (cjed) |
| The site Guardian.co.uk speaks about OpenCL and expects a Snow Leopard preview at Macworld Expo (January, 5). Phil Shiller will showcase the keynote instead of Steve Jobs, but the later could come back for the Macintosh 25th Anniversary (the Twentieth anniversary mac that was presented during Apple Expo 1997 was in fact about Apple's company creation date - and first computer -, but not related with first Macintosh, unveiled in January 1984). |
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| 12-18-08 / 10:03 PM : iPhone / Orange : prices cut (cjed) |
| The iPhone prices when acquired with an Orange subscription (and required points) is down : 79 and 99 euros for the 8Gb andt 16Gb models. |
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| 12-18-08 / 09:57 PM : Apple and PowerVR (cjed) |
| Apple buyed close to 4% of PowerVR share, in order to keep strong supply from the video chip maker for its iPhone, and gain even more independance (some months ago Apple buyed PA Semi). |
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| 12-17-08 / 11:49 PM : Vue 7 pioneer : free open beta (cjed) |
| Last October, e-on software presented two new versions of Vue d'Esprit 7 : a new high end version (Vue 7 Complete) at 599$ and an appealing entry level version at 50$ (that can be upgraded by buying additional modules - but it then costs more than the midlle Vue 7 Esprit priced 199$). Now Vue 7 pioneer is downloadable for free (open beta). No previous Vue d'Esprit account is required (but a Cornucopia3d account has to be created). Due to huge success, the servers are down. |
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| 12-17-08 / 12:13 PM : End of the monopole of Orange? (vincent) |
| This is at least what says Le Monde. |
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| 12-16-08 / 10:31 PM : New Apple ad / animation (cjed) |
| Here is the new Apple ad for holidays : I Can Do Anything. That time PC and Mac characters are made using animating. |
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| 12-16-08 / 12:46 AM : Google Native Client : not processor independant ? (cjed) |
| Google presented Native Client, a system that is aimed at countering Flash and Javascript based RDA solutions, on the performance area (the critical point). The principle is to call native processor instructions from a web browser container. A runtime is provided, as with a compiler (GCC, still available on OSX) and plugins for most of web browsers (including Safari). The runtime is only available for Intel macs, but Google plans to release it for PowerPC. While OS and browser independance is provided, it seems it is only on a processors family basis, as the applications have to be recompiled with a runtime that depends from the installed processor type (Intel, PPC, ARM). Among examples we can find a converted version of Quake. |
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| 12-15-08 / 10:31 PM : OSX 10.5.6 : Altivec 50% faster on PowerPC (cjed) |
| The MacOSX 10.5.6 update is finally available. We immediately notice that it is snappier (windows, minimizing), and after launching XBench (comparison with results from previous versions of Leopard) we discover that CPU performance is globally higher by 10 percents : in fact integer calculations (that count more and explain the 10% only increase) and vecLib FFT performances are the same, but floating point calcluations are 30% higher, and Altivec gains an even outstanding 50% increase, that gives it back the same result as with Tiger ! This last point was very important for audio applications, whose plugins use a lot Altivec (now abstracted APIs - targeted to Altivec on PPC and SSE on Intel - that were renamed Accelerate framework in Leopard). So there is no more reason to keep tiger for audio, and this fix demonstrates that Apple is aware of such details that plagged the old PPC under Leopard (there is to know if SSE4 instructions have also been used more efficiently in the Accelerate framework running under Intel). Quartz graphic engine performance remains the same (was still 10% more efficient than with Tiger), and the user test interface still shows the same previous hit over Tiger, a two times longer delay to display the controls under Leopard. As the Quartz engine isn't worse (is a little better), the reason is that Leopard puts more demand on it : windows shadows width have been at least doubled compared with previous OSX versions (in order to be more visible by Windows VISTA users - the laster added such over present effect). These shadows (dynamic) are computed by OSX with a huge precision (since the first version). Moreover the mirror effect used by Leopard Dock may add even more work (perhaps some precaching, besides the existing double buffering). When launching Safari it appears far more quick at opening windows and rendering pages. Apple may have updated the WebKit framework, or it might use the Altivec for some processing (that isn't intended for such task). The Finder (whose version is numbered aside) jumps from 10.5.6 to 10.5.8. |
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| 12-14-08 / 06:10 PM : AppStore : Top100 ranking dynamic & prices (cjed) |
| FluidMac, the editor of Chopper for iPhone, speaks about the complex dynamic progression of applications on the AppStore Top100, and their related prices : ...how does a developer get their app into the top 100 and stay there? Well, The best way is having a really good product that gets the press it deserves. This is still the biggest factor (as it should be), but is way too close to the second best way: Look stupidly cheap compared to everything else. Any developer who has dropped the price of their app will have seen the difference in sales it makes. $1.99 to $0.99 wouldn’t make any difference on most platforms, but because everything is already so stupidly cheap, it can double sales… or more. Double the sales at #101 and a day later you’re at # 70 with 4x the sales. At 4x the sales you’re at #50 two days later. It’s a feedback effect until everyone else drops their prices too, and you end up back where you started. ...As a result, I am more inclined to take small risks. A small 2 week project, priced at $0.99 has more chance of paying for my time than a 6 month project priced at $9.99. The quality of applications available on the App Store is nothing compared to what it could be. iPhone users are missing out on the $15.00 apps that could change their lives. ... a precious few developers will work hard and long to produce fantastic apps that will be low yielding, under priced, and motivation destroying. Prices appart, the AppStore must faces (now it has reached the 10 000 apps step) the same problem as musique-libre.org ranking system, as I recently said. |
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| 12-13-08 / 11:10 AM : SimCity for iPhone : first review (cjed) |
| The site kotaku.com provides screenshots of Need for Speed Unlimited for iPhone, and a first review of SimCity for iPhone.s |
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| 12-13-08 / 11:03 AM : Game One : documentary on Steve Jobs (cjed) |
| Game One will provide on Sunday, December, 14, a one hour length TV documentary about Steve Jobs. We could also watch again the TV movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley, now available on DVD, that features a cool ambiance (the same as with movies of music bands of late eigthies), despite being not so much realistic. |
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| 12-11-08 / 11:22 PM : Snow Leopard : more 2.5D for the Dock ? (cjed) |
| From an Apple patent titled multi-dimensional Desktop, Snow Leopard cound bring deeper 3D (in fact 2.5D) to the MacOSX Dock, that then could manage stacks of icons in the z-axis. In 2002 we could still use 3DOSX, that was impressive but wasn't really useful. |
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| 12-09-08 / 10:19 PM : OpenCL 1.0 ratified (cjed) |
| The Khronos Group announced that it has ratified OpenCL 1.0, whose development only took 6 months to Apple. AMD is following the path and will provide soon compliant compiler and runtime in its ATI SDK. On the NVIDIA side, the video chipsets maker states that its proprietary CUDA solution is now compliant with OpenCL architecture (that in fact covers a wider area of application than CUDA). Most companies are involved in OpenCL, except Microsoft, that is trying to extend its DirectX technology to allow acceleration of other tasks than video and 3D. |
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| 12-09-08 / 12:42 AM : Javascript & ActionScript : a step back (cjed) |
| Through the comments on the latest ArsTechnica article (September) about Cappuccino, we could read : Technologically, JavaScript apps running in a browser is like apps running under MultiFinder back in the Mac OS 6 days: no memory protection, cooperative multi-tasking, etc. One badly programmed web app and it takes down your entire browsers and all the other web apps and open web pages along with it. Worse, however, there are just about half a dozen software abstraction layers added, and thus, what used to work on a 68k CPU back then now requires a dual or quad-core CPU with GHz clock frequencies and Gigabytes of RAM just to get adequate performance. Can you say "back to the future"? JavaScript, Java, Flash, Cookies, etc. should be filtered out by the firewall. The web is a publishing platform, if you want to go back to mainframes and terminal based remote processing, then come up with a secure protocol that's designed for remote GUIs over low-bandwidth channels. The web isn't it. Lacking synchronization features (mutex), Javascript and other scripting languages aren't robust. And performance of Flash applications is really bad (ActionScript is derived from ECMAScript, the same basis as for Javascript) - can trigger fans in recent dual core latops (worse, on a G4 a new banner ad on the site prevents entering news as the browser becomes unresponsive due to huge resources leak). We van read an article that presents tricks to counter synchronization problems in Javascript. There isn't any CPLock class in Cappuccino, but source code from evaluate.js (and also CPTimer -timeouts) leads to think there is some sort of such tricks to simulate synchronization. Then as I previously said, the competition won't be only on the javascript engine side (SquirrelFish Extreme, Chrome, etc.), but also on the whole container side. All is container : browser for javascript or Flash plugin, AIR container for Flex outside the browser, Quicktime (Quicktime X will probably use HTML 5 sockets, and iTunes is still an hybrid application, that uses WebKit). As ECMAScript derived languages aren't satisfying, they will probably evolve, or new scripting languages will appear, but then we are back to existing powerful languages that we all know (Objective-C, etc.) We can't have robust and responsiveness interface using scripting languages, computing science is complex and thread and synchronization problems a reality. Google is working at parallelization and execution spaces protection for Javascript, but it will only delay occuring of bugs (as we did with some tricks on System 7 to delay crashes - safety memory blocks at the start of the adresses stack, and use of adresses starting from the top stack). The performance problems aren't specifically tied to interpreted languages. For example the latest Openoffice.org 3 for OSX is still far more slower (at least for page scrolling) than the older NeoOffice, although the later uses the Java bridge for UI. A 68040 LC475 with 4Mb of memory performed better under Word 5.1. Such software abstraction layers also exist in OSX itself : a Mach task is wrapped by a BSD task, that is at end wrapped by a Carbon task. We can hope the highest layer will be removed when Cocoa migration will be completed (Adobe is working on Cocoa versions of its softwares but this isn't still the case for Microsoft Office). There are plenty of optimization areas available on OSX however, as we can read throughout the great Cocoa programming book (I've yet read 930 pages). Hopefully the AppStore success and limited iPhone capabilities lead developers to think about optimizing, the same for Apple when it did the mobile version of OSX. That is the reason why the Objective-C 2 garbage collector isn't provided in the iPhone SDK. MacOSX will also finally benefit a lot from Grand Central and OpenCL, further 64 bits optimization, code cleaning and strong optimization for Intel only, advanced use of SSE4. |
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| 12-04-08 / 11:08 PM : JavaFX SDK 1.0 : still far behind Cappuccino (cjed) |
| Sun provides the JavaFX SDK 1.0. Through the presentation we only see strong inspiration from Apple's CoreAnimation and less ambitious architecture (scripting, rendering engine, media layer) than what Cappuccino can achieve (true Cocoa port to Javascript : evolved scripting that uses Objective-J, AppKit APIs including Quartz, CoreAnimation, drag&drop, undo/redo, views, etc.). Without counting what QuickTime X will add in the media layer area and UI controls for RDA. Moreover the JavaFX SDK requires a G5 mac (or Intel). |
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| 12-03-08 / 11:17 PM : Cappuccino CPTableView : source code (cjed) |
| In the dev source tree of Cappuccino we can finally get the source code of the CPTableView class. Its implementation is identical to the corresponding Cocoa class, the table requests its datasource delegate to get each cell value : [_dataSource tableView:self objectValueForTableColumn:_tableColumns[column] row:row]. Then the lines data cache has to be managed in the datasource implementation, if the data are retrieved through JSON calls, in order to prevent the application server to request the database for each new cell to display when scrolling up or down the table. We can simply maintain a dozen lines cells cache. |
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| 12-03-08 / 11:01 PM : Cappuccino : Add Undo/Redo tutorial (cjed) |
| At the thinkvitamin site we can find a tutorial about adding Undo/Redo to a Cappuccino application. As with Cocoa programming, the UndoManager is aware that a Redo is undoing the undo, so it cleans the actions stacks and doesn't require to implement the Redo feature. I didn't find the undo and redo buttons in the example here (nor managed to get Pomme-Z to produce something). |
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| 12-01-08 / 11:22 PM : AppStore : 10000 apps / 8,9% macs on the web (cjed) |
| The site 148apps provides a
mini-icons grid linking to the 10 000 applications and games available at the AppStore (in only 6 months) ! This record is also reported by Yahoo, that states that the competition is far behind in terms of quality and content. Statistics (number of submissions per month, per price and per category) are also available at 148apps. Meanwhile the mac share on internet was rising up to 8,9 percents, and Safari obtained 7,13 % (20% for Firefox - but there is to consider that it is also used on mac, whereas Safari usage on PC is very low -, and only 0,83% for Chrome, that is ten times less than Safari). |
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