Linked List: February 20, 2010

Saturday, 20 February 2010

Core Animation and Flash Player 

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.

Flex 4 List Scrolling on Android With Flash Player 10.1 

“It’s a little slow… but we haven’t really optimized this yet for this sort of thing.”

Google Deprecating Gears in Favor of HTML5 

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.

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. Note that ShrinkIt wasn’t designed for typical (for users) PDFs-as-documents, but rather for PDFs-as-vector-images; in Panic’s case, for resolution-independent user interface elements.