-8°C,
Light snow 
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.
Sleep 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 
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.
Bah .. I was hoping for an increase in performance when playing videos in HD because Adobe’s Firefox plugin is absolutely terrible. So many bug reports, so many performance reports and Adobe still just shrug and ignore the problem. We need a new player for mulimedia content on websites, and as far as I know, the only alternative is Silverlight but it focuses stricly on Windows (ie no quicktime playback etc.) and it lacks in features which makes it unappealing for developers.
One can only hope that Adobe will get their heads out of their rears and start working on the problems associated with their player. Fat chance of that happing though.
Anyone from up north (the european north) heading to MAX? We’re already arriving on saturday, but will probably be too exhausted to do anything that night. But do come have a few (=lots) pints with us on Saturday for some pre-conferencing
It would also be cool to join any Adobe User Group meeting that weekend. Anyone know where one’s beeing held?
Finally I decided to get myself the internet precense I deserved and got myself my own artman.fi-domain. You know, I’ve always dreaded the moment I leave Valve (yes, eventually that too will happen…) because I loose my company email-address as well. I can’t even count the number of services I’ve registered to with that specific email. Most services nowadays use the email-address as the login name, and usually the login name cannot be changed (stupid, is it not?).
After pondering over this for the past few years (and even subscribing to MobileMe to provide support for all those users who use my iPhone Web Feeds app) it was time to get an email-address which I can be certain of will follow me through the rest of my life.
Once I had the domain I thought about the same thing with my personal blog, previously hosted at valveblog.com. Again, my personal blog was tied to a company that at some point in the future I might not be working for anymore. ValveBlog started out as a co-hosted blog run my me and a few colleagues, but it clearly became apparent that I was the only one doing all the writing, so it sort of just became my personal blog over the matter of a few years.
So yeah, brand new, risen from the ashes of ValveBlog (a design that was way too old anyways) I present you with this mash-up of blog, tweets, mobile photos, weather info and delicious links.
It’s still very rough around the edges, but should get better every now and then when I have the time to play. And oh, if some Art Director from Valve would like to help me out with the background for example, I’d greatly appreciate the help.
Long live the new Artman dot fi! Recognized that you’ve started to post photos to Flickr as well. Including some old stuff too 
Yeah, had to find some “täytettä” to the mobile photo-blog before going live;)
LyhjeHylje 22:41 on February 7, 2010 Permalink |
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 |
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.