The first preview of the upcoming Flex 4.5 SDK – code-named Hero – has gone live and Deepa Subramaniam, Flex SDK product manager, just announced it. Newsworthy on Deepa’s post is that Adobe, at least for this release, has chosen to build the SDK against a future, yet to be announced Flash Player. Because of this, they have not been, and will not be able to post nightly builds, as they don’t want to give away any new features of the Player.

At least to me, that sounds weird.

Sure, we’re all know that companies love to control the publicity of new products, mostly to gain enough momentum to get good press out of an launch event. It sure makes sense to control product details regarding (for example) CS6, but the Flash Player is a different beast. End-users don’t care about new features, and developers don’t need to press to tell them.

So what gives? Why hide upcoming features of the Flash Player? Wouldn’t being totally open about the future of the player be a great way of getting the community involved in the development of the player? After all, it’s developers, not end-users that you build the Player for. Wouldn’t it totally make sense to have the input of the community as early as possible and be able to act upon that feedback without an 1,5 year cycle?

The only reason I’ve identified for this secrecy is the fear of competition (Silverlight). The introduction of Silverlight’s latest release was one of the biggest Deja’vu moments I’ve had.

Check it out on the Store, and give it try. It’s only $1.99, way less than the competition.

The HTML5 vs. Flash debacle has all but died down. And that’s a good thing as I didn’t really think any of the argumentation was really valid. However, the whole thing got me once again thinking of how I use Flash. As a developer, I’ve started using Flash and Flex less and less. This of course is tied to my current job, where we use Flash only as small components in an otherwise HTML-based app. I’ve done my share of Flex and Flash applications and campaigns in the past, but now that I come to think of it, I actually _never_ use any application that is based on the Flash Platform. Sure, I do try out things, like Audiotool (which I think happens to be one of the best engineered Flash apps out there), but I’m not a user.

The closest I come to being a user of a Flash Platform based  app is with (social) games. That makes me wonder. Is there really any Flash application out there that people are actually using? And I’m talking productivity or business use, not entertainment. Hit me with your comments!

Just moved this blog over to MediaTemple, so there might be a few hiccups during the next few as this gives me a good reason to fix a few things here and there that have bothered me but that I’ve never had the time to fix.

I searched quiet a bit to get an hosting provider that had a good reputation and was inexpensive, and eventually settled for MediaTemple, as there are so many developers and designers praising them and so far I’ve been happy. Access is of course a bit slow from Finland, but hey, you can’t transfer stuff faster than the speed of light. Or can you, hmm?

The TLF framework is a good example of the current status quo regarding native implementations vs. AS3 frameworks at Adobe. Adobe is implementing core functionality (layout of text) through an ActionScript Framework and not as a native implementation in the Flash Player. Sure, you have the low-level text engine classes and API that let you actually use low-level layout and rendering, but Flash has for a long time implemented high-level API’s natively.

Lets discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Frameworks vs. native implementations:

Advantages:

1. Updatability. You don’t rely on Flash Player updates to deliver new functionality or bug fixes.
2. The Flash Player download size does not increase

Disadvantages:

1. Speed. If you remember my recent post on our AS3-2-Java compiler, the same code run 800 times more faster in Java than it did in the Flash Player using AS3. So expect things to run three orders of magnitude slower.
2. Bloat. The framework takes a chunch of bandwidth for every piece of SWF that uses the framework, as it’s embedded in each and every SWF that uses is (yes, there’s of course the framework cache, but still, cache misses are currently more frequent than hits)

IMHO the bad _clearly_ outweighs the good. Heck, I would donate second testicle to have Flash run even a bit faster. Now fast forward to the days of Flex. You’ve got hundreds of components littering the screen are your CPU just screams for help. If you inspect your List-based component you quickly get dizzy with the number of UIComponents flying around. Not only is there one for each base component, but with Flex 4 you’re essentially doubling the number of UIComponents on screen as all of your skin files are based on UIComponent as well.

Now to me it would seem logical to just implement the UIComponent natively as it does so much of an apps work (measure, layout, (in)validation, focus & input management and whatnot). At least it would be an interesting experiment on how much every Flex app would gain from a native implementation of the UIComponent (oh, and while you’re at it, put in a native implementation for Group and GraphicElement as well).

You know, it was in 2006 when the last speed increase in the order of a magnitude was revealed by the Player team at Max 2006 2005. We need an encore! Only this time, please make that two orders of magnitude.

A week back I took on to fix a bug on our Flash-based video-chat component on Sofanatics. The fix was one of the most unexpected I’ve yet encountered.

While testing we found out that our video-chat component had a fatal flaw with Mac Firefox-browsers. When we initiate a chat-session, the component asks the user to gain access to his camera an microphone through the standard security dialog that’s presented by the Flash Player. For some reason, whenever this dialog came up, it did not accept any input. The user could not accept, dismiss or change the tabs on the dialog, so the client was essentially stuck.

Quickly playing with the wmodes for embedding the client it turned out that wmode opaque was the culprit. With wmode window everything worked out fine. That was not acceptable in our case, though, since we used other modal html-based windows that covered the Flash client, so we couldn’t use the window wmode.

Our site is fairly complex and the client itself gets animated in via HTML, so I tried just for the sake of it to place the client somewhere else within the DOM. There were places where it worked, and others where it didn’t, so I jumped to the conclusion that some CSS rules (or a combination of rules when traversing down the DOM) mess up Firefox and make the Flash client unclickable. Oddly though, our content in the Flash client was very much clickable and worked without any problems, only the security dialog was not clickable.

Hmm, quickly testing I removed all styles from the site and tested. That fixed the problem. So it had to be somewhere in the CSS, some rule that made the security dialog unresponsive. So I did a number of tests, removing a piece of CSS at a time until I isolated the selector that caused this issue. It was a browser reset selector with a number of rules that I’ve used in most of my sites which is to allign every browser to render in the same way.

Doing the same test for the rules within the selector, I finally found the culprit. One single CSS rule that made the security dialog non-responsive on Mac’s Firefox:

Say what? Right…

A acquaintance of mine had a conversation with an Adobe executive discussing about jumping ship to Unity3D for their upcoming Virtual Worlds. The executive reportedly said that Unity is going to die away in a short while, hinting at 3D functionality (you know, _real_ 3D functionality, meshed, GPU-rendered) in the next version of Flash. There’s also a session at Max this year titled “Flash Player 3D Future” presented by a Flash Player engineer where he’ll demo new API’s in an upcoming Flash Player release.

So, everything points to Flash Player 11 finally having a real 3D rendering engine and joining the fight for online 3D supremacy against WebGL and Unity3D.

While I think that it’s almost one of those CE-Oh no, he didn’t! no he didn’t moments to say that Unity3D is going away because of the Flash Player, it’s a really welcome addition (if done right) to the Flash Player and has been long due.

Unity kicks ass, and especially Unity 3 with it’s deferred rendering, MOD support (wOOt, have been asking that from the Flash Player teams since version 5), audio effects, beast light-mapping, super-fast scripting, umbra occlusion culling, physics and great editor is something that the Flash Player and IDE will never be able to match for serious 3D game development.

On the other hand you obviously have the great penetration (and big community) of the Flash Player which will drive casual game development away from Unity.

It’s nice to get surprised positively once in a while by a service provider. Today, I got a mail from my ISP, Welho, telling me that they’ve doubled my internet connection speed to 200 mbit/sec at no charge. And yes, SpeedTest.net now gives me a download speed of 155 mbit/sec.

Well, thanks!

Uh-oh. That was quick. Just a few months ago many were noting that Apple’s market cap was closing fast on Microsoft’s. Back then the gap was still 50 Billion.S dollars. Just now the gap has shrunken to 5 Billion. And Apple is still gaining fast. A recent Stanley Morgan put the target for Apple’s stock price at 310$ (currently it’s 250$). After a few days Apple is bound to go past Microsoft and take the number 2 spot just after Exxon Mobil. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a fly on Ballmer’s wall?

Update: There it is. Apple is now valued at 222,1B $, while Microsoft is at 219,2B $.

Well, it’s not actually a virus, as it still needs user interaction to post itself to your wall, but still it spreads like hell. Here’s how it works:

You wonder why all of your friends are posting links to http://www.fbhole.com/omg/allow.php?s=a&r=72306 (warning! don’t open this link just yet, or if you do, don’t click anywhere). You get to the site, get a cryptic error message (which looks like a Windows dialog, if you happen to use Windows). You try to click it and boom, you’ve just reposted the link to your wall. Huh?

Looking at the source, what happens here is quite simple and is an old trick if you’re familiar with how people were able to open a browse for file dialog with Flash 9. An iframe with 0.001 opacity is opened on the site (pointing to http://www.fbhole.com/omg/tab.htm) which again contains a iframe pointing to Facebooks connect/prompt_feed.php, which is used by a gazillion sites to let users post a message to their wall. This iFrame is then repositioned whenever your mouse moves so that the publish button of that dialog is positioned under you mouse pointer. When you click, anywhere on the page, you actually click the Publish button which posts the pre-filled text containing a link back to the site to your profile.

No worries though, your personal information is (as the time of writing) not compromised by this hack, but it will most certainly have implications to Facebooks sharing functionality.

Update: For those of you who appreciate the “Objects may appear closer than they actually are”-warnings in the rear view mirror of U.S cars, the hack currently does not steal anything, but that’s not to say following the link will be safe in the *future*. It can be changed to something malicious after a million or so users have forwarded it. So be careful, or use a Mac

Update 2: The worm was taken offline. It seems that Mikko Hyppönen, Finlands #1 celebrity in antivirus affairs was able to track the Czech dude who put this out on the interwebs and give him a call:

Domain fbhole.com shared an IP address with ironbrain.net [82.208.32.99]. Ironbrain.net hosted a website with references to Facebook but no obvious illegal content. While fbhole.com was registered with privacy protection, ironbrain.net had contact information in the WHOIS database, complete with a Czech phone number.

So I called the number.

The call went roughly like this:

– Hello?
– Hi. This is Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure Labs.
– What is this about?
– I’m looking for a person related to ironbrain.net.
– ???
– We’re investigating a Facebook worm on fbhole.com. That domain shares an IP address with ironbrain.net which is registered under your name.
– And you are?
– I’m from an antivirus company. Are you related to ironbrain.net?
– I’ll have to check… maybe my company is…
– Please do.
– Bye…
[Click]

About 15 seconds later, both fbhole.com and ironbrain.net went offline. The attack is over.

TripSay recently introduced a fantastic new feature to their web service – hotel bookings. The feature in itself is nothing exciting (they’re even using booking information from booking.com only), but it’s the way they’ve implemented it, that’s fantastic.

You’re essentially searching on top of a map of the city you’re about to visit and tools let you easily drill down the number of results shown on the map by dates, stars, budget and location. Hotels matching your search result are shown as markers on the map including the average price per night, giving you a fantastic overview of what’s available in the target city.

One fantastic functionality is to center the location of your search around a specific sight or location.

If you haven’t already tried it, you should. I know I won’t be using anything else for all of my hotel bookings from here forward.

Of course even the best can be made even better. Markers could be slightly smaller, as you get a lot of overlap when you’re browsing a city with loads of hotels.

Kudos to the team. This rocks!

Ouch. If that does not hurt, I don’t know what does. After introducing iPhone OS 4.0, Apple updated it’s developer user agreement to disallow AppStore submissions that link to API’s through intermediary translation (in effect, not written directly in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript).

This essentially means that Apple won’t accept any apps submitted to the AppStore created with Flash CS5 or any of the other not yet released ways of publishing for the iPhone. Hundreds and hundreds of man work months down the drain.

“Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

This comes three days before the introduction of CS5. The main USP for Flash CS5 before today was that it was able to compile for the iPhone OS. Would love to be a fly on the wall of Adobe’s executive team.

Enough already. I’ve been asked a number of times what I think about Flash beeing killed by HTML 5 and I’m really getting tired of the whole discussion (which to begin with is not very interesting). That’s why I’m writing this down in a post so as to spare me from answering the same dull question once and for all.

Those seeking a quick answer to whether HTML 5 is going to kill Flash, the answer is: “No”. A slightly longer answer would go: “No, but I hope it did”.

iPhones, iPads

So the iPhone and the iPad does not support Flash, and quite likely never will. So what? At the time of writing there is no single mobile phone to be bought by consumers that support a full Flash experience (to me that is Flash 10 within the browser). So, if there’s no single mobile phone today that supports the Flash experience, how come Flash is still alive? The mobile web is still different from the desktop web, and it’s going to stay that way for a while still. People use the mobile web for different purposes and I really don’t think that to this day many have missed Flash on their mobile devices. The iPad is a different story, as the experience and use scenarios come close to the desktop web. But I think that the absence of Flash on the iPad is Apple’s loss, not Adobe’s.

Video

Whenever a major newspaper with inexperienced tech journalists write about how Flash is being killed by HTML they always refer to the video embedding capabilities of the spec. And nothing else really. Somehow someone has been able to seed the perception that Flash = web video. Within that false perception, HTML5 might actually kill Flash (in the distant future). Somebody will create a fantastic plug-in for jQuery UI that puts lovely controls around all video tags on a page, and that will become the norm. For that to happen, however, most users on the web will need to surf on a HTML5 enabled browser. Usually “most users” refers to more than 90% of all users (after which developers can start to remove any gracious fallbacks that involve Flash). If you look at the market share of IE6, which was released ages ago, you know it’ll take a while to reach that 90%.

Silverlight

The fact that Microsoft has created Silverlight and still keeps on pushing it hard is actually a case for Flash surviving the “onslaught of HTML5″. If MS felt that they could not compete with HTML5 using a plug-in technology that is far less spread than the Flash Player, they would not pour millions of dollars into it’s R&D. Nuff’ said.

But I wouldn’t mind if it did kill Flash

On the other side of this argument are Flash developers, screaming out loud things like “To arms! Flash is under attack”. WTF? Let’s imagine that HTML5 (or whatever else) would actually kill Flash.

For this to happen, there would need to be a technology or language that would be widespread amongst internet users, embraced by developers and thus superior to whatever it is that Flash is doing now. Metathesiophics (people who fear change, yes I had to look that up) aside, wouldn’t that be great? Whatever comes along, it’s bound to be programmable by something which reminds us (or is) of ECMA-Script or Java, so there’s really no steep learning curve for any Flash developer, especially as change does not come overnight, but over many years (sad but true).

So yeah, I hope something kills of Flash really quickly.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Now even corporations who have policies against switching from IE can maybe think about upgrading to a modern browser.

I just wonder what the User-Agent is send with each HTTP-request send from this hijacked browser…

Well, it turns out everybody was wrong, and sorting with an AS3 algorithm is indeed almost twice as fast as it’s native counterpart!

Consider the following code:

The class will simply run two native sorts to test the performance on a totally random unordered and ordered Vector.<Number> and then run two sorts on the same data with a pure AS3 implementation of Shell Sort.

Shell sort has a good worst case resolve speed and works quiet well even when the origin data is already sorted or almost sorted.

The results

On my iMac native sort on the Vector with 10.000 Numbers took an average of 50 milliseconds. When sorting the already sorted Vector again, it took an average of 38 milliseconds.

The AS3 algorithm took an average of 31 milliseconds to sort the random Vector and only 15 milliseconds to sort the sorted Vector. (Update: in debug mode!)

In real life where Vectors that need to be sorted are usually not totally random, you’ll get a two-fold increase in sorting speed compared to the native algorithm.

Some things to consider, though: Shell sorting in this example gives you a head start over the native sorting algorithm that the data to be sorted are primitives. If you wanted to sort Objects (typed objects of course) based on one of their properties shellSort would no longer outperform Flash Player’s native sort, as the speed is eaten up by those numerous object property look-ups. However even then it comes very close and in programs that often sort Vectors with objects that are already almost in the right order, you’ll beat the native sorter by 10-30%.

But there’s one great type of project where speeding up sorting of Numerical Vectors will increase application performance greatly and that’s 3D. I started to dig into these algorithms after my profiler told me that 25% of all of my CPU time was going into sorting 3D polygons. Only the drawing operation was slower, but not by much.

P.S. If you want even better performance, don’t just rely on a single sorting algorithm. QuickSort is 20 times faster than Shell Sort if the Vector is already sorted, but absolutely freaking slow if the Vector sorting order is random. In 3D scenes it might be a good idea to switch between these, using Shell sort for your initial render, the user quick sort if your model rotates only slightly and thus only a few poly’s are out of place.

Update: Erik correctly pointed out that I should test the sorting algorithm in the release player instead of the debug player in debug mode, as this might affect results. And indeed it did. It made Shell sorting became much faster. A vector with 100.000 random Numbers took:

Native sort: 338 ms

Native sort on ordered Vector: 245 ms

AS3 Shell sort: 98 ms

AS3 Shell sort on ordered Vector: 49 ms

Who would have thought that interpreted code can do the job 3-5 times more quickly than a native call.

Update: I forgot to mention the license of the source code. Consider it Public Domain.

Update 2: Doh. I ported the code too quickly. inc should have been rounded, not floored. Updated the code to work properly.

Straight from the start of our MMOG Platform project we knew we wanted to create a technology which is better than anything previously available (or unavailable in the case of proprietary, closed platforms). Quite big words, so we needed a big idea.

Client synchronization and metaprogramming

I’m currently the lead front-end developer and am closely working together with a phenomenal Java guru to specify and develop ( actually specifying through developing ) out the low-level bits and pieces for our technology.

While the VM2 is fast enough for most of the logic we’re expecting our platform to be used for, the same thing can’t be said about rendering. Kids expect quiet a bit of graphics crunching from todays desktop games, and online games are catching up really quickly. Even five years ago Shockwave was able to harness the power of the GPU, making it still about 10.000 times faster to render texels as Flash 10 does (mileage may vary). While this is crucial for 3D games, it would still make a lot of sense to have 2D drawn on the GPU aswell. (and no, don’t even dare to write a comment about wmode=gpu, unless you’re Tinic and have some ace up you’re sleeve).

Up next

From now on I’ll try to use telepathy whenever I’m in the U.S.

I can live with the review process taking a week, but what bothers me is that my App has been in “Ready for sale” status for a week now, without it actually going live. And any inquiries send to Apple have simply not been answered. It would be nice get at least some kind of faint echo to my emails.

By the way, a big thanks to Junnu for designing the fantastic icon for “Feeds”. It looks gorgeous on an iPhone.

Yeah! We just received word that UPM Forest Life won the Corporate Communications category Webby Award.

Webby – check.
New York Festivals – check.
LIAA – check.
Cresta – check.

Now the only big one still missing is the CyberLion.