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  • FP 10.1 Finally delivers speed improvements for OS X

    artman 10:24 on February 28, 2010 | 0 comments | Tags: , flashplayer

    Saturn v rockets@NASA

    I thought of writing a post on how the Flash Player absolutely sucks on OS X. Jeah, people have been writing a number of related posts, but I didn’t think anyone actually grasped the severity of the issue. Flash 10.0 in Safari 4 on Snow Leopard (64 bit, FP running in it’s own process) actually becomes what I would say unusable. Even if you don’t do much processing, frame-rates plummet by at least a factor of four compared to a Window XP setup with the same hardware. And sure, while Firefox on OS X has run Flash sort of okeyish, it has never been able to compare against a Windows counterpart.

    That is, up to now.

    Tinic had a great post on changes they’ve made to how they composite Flash Player 10.1 renderings in the browser. The changes truly have made a big difference. Compared to 10.0, 10.1 screams on Safari, and is also a bit faster on Firefox.

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  • iSlate/iPad/iTablet

    artman 20:24 on January 21, 2010 | 0 comments

    02-itablet-islate-iphone-apple3-480x326.jpg

    I’ve never seen a product being talked about this much before actually beeing introduced as the iSlate/iPad/iTablet. Compared to this, the iPhone rumors were just mere whispers in the wind.

    Now, can anyone really expect for the tablet to actually live up to the expectations, unless the “one more thing” is that it actually self-levitates.

    We’ll have to see next wednesday.

    Update: Well, it didn’t self-levitate. What a bummer.

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  • Sleep Phase wakeup clock now available on the App Store

    artman 20:24 on January 12, 2010 | 2 comments | Tags: appstore, c, , objective-c

    Good NightSleep Phase wakeup clock, my second iPhone app is now available on the App Store. It’s a alarm clock, which monitors your sleep rythm through the iPhone’s microphone or accelerometer and wakes you up in a light sleep phase, which means you’ll feel energized and refreshed every morning.

    Originally I had this idea more than a year ago, but did not start to experiment with some code untill last summer. I was about to wrap everything up this christmas, when I stumbled upon Sleep cycle alarm clock, which was released about a month ago. They’ve sold over 100.000 copies in the first month. Lazy me, could have beat them to the store had I tried a bit harder. Well, life sucks.

    Anyways, I do appreciate what I learned from this “project”. It all came together much easier than Web Feeds, the first iPhone app I created one and a half years ago. Go ahead, give it a go, it’s not that expensive ;)

    Update: I pulled the app from the store. I realized that I need to figure out a better, more descriptive name than “Good Night”. Unfortunately the app name cannot be changed once it’s submitted.

    Update 2: It’s available once more under the Sleep Phase wakeup clock name.

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    • LyhjeHylje 22:41 on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      The app seems to be back named as “Sleep Phase”? Just bought it and has one question: it says I can lock my phone, but once it said I must NOT lock my phone. The latter occurred after I had locked the phone and removed it from charger while the app was running.
      So can I lock the phone or not?

    • Tuomas Artman 09:26 on February 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      You can lock your phone if:
      1) You are using microphone monitoring
      2) You keep your phone charging

      If you lock your phone and have don’t have it on a charger, the app will be put to sleep by the OS.

  • artman 23:11 on December 30, 2009 | 0 comments | Tags: problems

    Had a small hickup, due to our server melting. Everything should be back up now…

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  • Building MMOG's for the Flash Platform - AS3 to Java Byte-code Compiler

    artman 21:20 on November 9, 2009 | 0 comments | Tags: , , ,

    Hot Java

    Whoa, long time no post about this subject. My apologies. This one won’t be long either, but I just had to share this freakin’ cool thing.

    You might have read before that one big part of our MMOG Platform is the ability to write all code in AS3. Client-side as well as Server side. As there is no real AS3 server-side technology available we had to write our own. Our first version was up and running almost a year ago. Performance back then was OK, our tests showed us that our compiler could generate Java Byte-code from AS3 that ran as quickly as AS3 in the Flash Player, and included almost all core functionality of the AS3 scripting language.

    Jump forward a year and now we have our second version of our compiler up and running (well, compiling). And boy is it fast. When you write decent code with type annotations and all, the compiler will churn out almost perfect Java Byte-code without pushing anything on the stack.

    Performance?

    Our simple (and yeah, a bit biased I must say) test suite with heavy calculations performed wonderfully. We ran the same test suite in the Flash Player and in it’s compiled form from the command line (compiling from the same source code of course).

    All I can say is wow. Optimally, our AS3 to Java compiler produces byte code that runs 900 times faster than ActionScript in the Flash Player. 900 times.

    This of course won’t hold true in the real world where we pass around closures, dynamic objects and other resource hogs. But from what we can gather it should be around 100 times faster even then. Stay tuned for some real world tests once we get to those.

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  • Vattenfall, please explain yourself

    artman 21:14 on November 2, 2009 | 0 comments | Tags: carbon, electricity, green, oil, power

    wind-power

    I just moved, and started to compare prices for electricity. Vattenfall has a great number of options to choose from. You can choose with what method the electricity you’re buying has been produced. Nuclear, wind, water or “basic” (=nuclear, fossil, wind & water). Now, the pricing for wind generated power is a bit higher than for the other options, but what was really surprising was that the “basic” option, which is powered by fossil fuels in addition to clean energy is priced the same as electricity that has been generated 100% from water power.

    My question is, why the hell does Vattenfall have an option that includes fossil fuels when there is a clean option at the same price point?

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  • artman 22:10 on October 29, 2009 | 2 comments | Tags: , unity

    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.

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    • Janki 19:20 on November 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Seriously… Inspite of screaming and shouting for years, Flash doesnt have sophisticated 3d engine…looks like its time to say hello to Unity …

    • Poof 04:00 on November 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      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 :P

  • Apple logo infringement in Web Feeds

    artman 09:45 on October 29, 2009 | 0 comments

    512K Apple

    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…

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  • Full GPU acceleration coming with Flash Player 10.1

    artman 05:56 on October 5, 2009 | 1 comments | Tags: , gpu,

    nVidia

    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.

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