By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: October 20, 2008
Monday, 20 October 2008
- Apple Enabled GPU Hardware Decoding of H.264 on New MacBooks, Pros and Airs? ★
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Interesting report by Arnold Kim, suggesting that the new MacBook lineup offers hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding. In particular, 1080p playback now consumes far less CPU time. I presume that the iPhone has done this all along for H.264 playback, but, if true, this would be the first time Macs have used hardware acceleration for H.264. More on this from David Chartier at Ars Technica.
- Benchmarking Flash Player 10 ★
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Performance still sucks on Mac OS X compared to Windows Vista. Using the exact same computer (four-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM), Hulu video playback consumes 56 percent CPU on Mac OS X 10.5 vs. just 7 percent on Vista. Flash video playback is about eight times more efficient on Windows. And yet people wonder why Apple isn’t anxious to get Flash on the iPhone.
Update: “Eight times more efficient” may well be the wrong conclusion, in that the 56 percent figure for Mac OS X is for one of the four CPU cores, whereas the 7 percent figure for Windows may be 7 percent of all available CPU cycles. Even so, it’s still twice as efficient on Windows than on Mac OS X.
- If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Upgrade It ★
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Dan Moren profiles Bob Staake, the artist who still uses Photoshop 3.0:
But the way he talks about CS2 makes it clear that it’s more of an obstacle than an enabler when it comes to getting down to creative work. “When I open up Photoshop 3.0, it’s there and ready to go in four seconds flat, and when I have opened CS2 my fingernails will have grown a quarter inch before the app appears,” Staake says.
- FriendDA ★
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Say it out loud and it makes perfect sense.
- Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby ★
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New ADC article introducing MacRuby, Apple’s in-progress project for writing Cocoa applications in Ruby. What makes MacRuby different than the RubyCocoa bridge is that MacRuby is an implementation of the Ruby language built on the existing Cocoa runtime:
More specifically, MacRuby’s fundamental data types such as String, Array, and Hash are re-implemented on top of their CoreFoundation counterparts (CFString, CFArray and CFDictionary, respectively). All strings created in MacRuby are native Cocoa strings and can be passed to underlying C or Objective-C APIs that expect a Cocoa object, no conversion occurs. This implementation detail also implies that strings in MacRuby are UTF-16 compliant by default.
- NYT Report on the Health of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential Candidates ★
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Best write-up I’ve seen regarding John McCain’s history of melanoma and Joe Biden’s brain aneurysms.
Also interesting is to compare Sarah Palin to Ronald Reagan. Regarding Palin:
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, 44, Mr. McCain’s running mate, has released no medical information.
That’s it. Zip. Nada. Not even a one-page summary. Regarding Reagan, back in 1980:
A leading example of openness was Ronald Reagan, whose age, 69, had become an issue in the 1980 election. Mr. Reagan authorized his doctors to be interviewed. He also agreed to an interview himself, against the wishes of his aides, answering all my questions, including what would he do if he became senile as president.
“Resign,” he said.
- Microsoft Patents Automatic Audio Censoring ★
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Maybe they can put this technology to use on their “V word” problem.
- ‘V Word’ ★
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Apple’s new “V Word” commercial is rather interesting. On the surface it’s typical “Get a Mac” comedy. But the message is actually meta-mockery of Microsoft’s recent rebranding push. Apple’s calling Microsoft out for something that is obvious but which I hadn’t really thought about until seeing this spot — that they’re no longer mentioning “Vista” by name but talking only about “Windows” generically. The “Windows 7” moniker fits in with this.
“Vista” has turned into such poison, marketing-wise, that even Microsoft is dropping it.