Yup, Unity3D just got a new version and is now free of charge (at least the former Indie version). Boom says Flash as it’s beeing overtaken by other development environments for sophisticated web-based games. The guys at Adobe just won’t listen that they are really missing out on something big.
So I finally got an update to Web Feeds – an iPhone RSS reader app – send to Apple for review. It took quiet a while and yesterday I got a message that the update was rejected due to “infringement of Apple trademarks”. Huh?
I know the reviewers are very busy and probably have only minutes to test each update and look for suspicious activity. In this case their decision is rather sad. The application is preconfigured with some RSS-feeds users could be interested in, namely Huff-Post, Boing Boing, Engadget and, yes, Apple Hot News.
Now, when the app launches it fetches the feeds and looks for any FavIcons in the Feed’s domain like any web browser does. Of course the Apple Hot News feed loads up the grey-white apple FavIcon from apple.com. Enough for the reviewer to reject this update (oh, all the other 10 updates have gone through without anyone noticing, hmm).
Maybe I’ll just resubmit without the Apple Hot News feed…
NVIDIA took the big surprise out of tomorrows MAX keynote by adding a pamphlet to the MAX swag bag that everyone received when registering. It says:
Unique technical partnership between NVIDIA and Adobe engineers optimizes full pipeline acceleration of Flash 10.1 on the GPU.
This means two things: Flash Player 11 will not see the light of day tomorrow. Instead, a minor version update 10.1 is going to be releasead. This release will see full graphics pipeline rendering on the GPU. In my mind this means that everything from rendering vectors, text, transforms and Pixel Bender to compositioning will run on the GPU. That’s absolutely fantastic (if true)!
However, having only a minor revision of FP released tomorrow probably means that there won’t be many other new features. But expect to see a number of notifications regarding running FP on mobile devices. Again the NVIDIA pamphlet provided some unexpected news:
Full GPU acceleration of dynamic games and rich internet applications in the palm of your hand
Seems that GPU acceleration (and FP 10.1) is comming to your mobile (if your mobile is NVIDIA TEGRA-powered, err, which it is not…).
Stay tuned and watch the keynotes.
[Update] Shit. GPU acceletation will only be available for mobile devices and selected notebooks. Windows 7 (i.e. DiretX 11 machines) will have h.264 decoded on the GPU, but won’t support full GPU acceleration in the rendering pipeline. Mac’s and Linux boxes have even less support for the GPU. Big bummer. I really think Adobe is missing a big opportunity here. Unity3D or Torque3D will become the defacto web-based game plugin, at least for 3D games.
Seriously… Inspite of screaming and shouting for years, Flash doesnt have sophisticated 3d engine…looks like its time to say hello to Unity …
I recently used flash to create something 3D for a website… it took me way to long make and it takes up to much cpu then it should for a 3D application though