xtex.org

These benchmarks from Mike Chambers are more interesting to me than the aforelinked ones from Jan Ozer, if only because he ran them on the same hardware. Safari once again blows away Chrome and Firefox on the Mac — especially on JavaScript/Canvas examples, but even on Flash ones. Perhaps more interestingly, his results show Flash Player doing pretty well on the Mac (in Safari) compared to Windows overall, including HD video playback from Vimeo.

 ★ 

Rob Foster, observing how family and friends use their Macs:

Because they can now actually use their computers instead of simply restarting them, I’m able to better see how they use them. And the one commonality I’ve seen is that no one knows how to use the file system.

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

 ★ 

Speaking of Merlin Mann, he’s got a nice retort to Marco Arment’s piece from a few days back regarding media consumption and entitlement.

 ★ 

No technical details provided. My hunch is that they’re right, though.

 ★ 

Speaking of HTML5 video and Flash, Dave Hall has released a new GPL-licensed JavaScript project that lets you embed videos in HTML using the simple HTML5 <video> element; for browsers that don’t support HTML5 video, the Html5media script swaps in a Flash player.

 ★ 

Ozer draws the conclusion that Flash Player’s access to hardware acceleration is the key advantage to its superior performance on Windows. And, indeed, the best results in the whole test were for Flash Player 10.1 on Windows. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Mac OS X eventually offers similar APIs — seems like a serious performance win.)

But there are a lot of other interesting numbers in Ozer’s results. Particularly if you look at Flash Player 10.0, which doesn’t use hardware acceleration on Windows, either. In both Chrome and Firefox, Flash uses about twice as much CPU time to render the same video on the Mac as on Windows. Flash performance is noticeably better in Safari on the Mac than it is in Chrome or Firefox — I did not know that. Video performance in Chrome for Mac — both HTML5 and Flash — is downright terrible. (YouTube ought to stop telling Mac-using Safari users to “Try YouTube in a fast, new web browser!” with a link to Chrome.)

Bottom line: Flash plays H.264 video at least twice as efficiently on Windows as on the Mac; Safari’s native HTML5 video playback is very efficient.

The whole test might need to be taken with a grain of salt though. Ozer couldn’t get Bootcamp working on his MacBook Pro, so:

I tested on the Mac using a MacBook Pro (3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 GB RAM, OS 10.6.2) while testing on Windows using an Hewlett Packard 8710w mobile workstation (2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo system running 64-bit Windows 7 with 2 GB of RAM).

Seems to me the Mac hardware was significantly faster than the Windows hardware — so I suspect his results are misleading with regard to just how much more efficient Flash is on Windows than Mac OS X.

 ★ 

Merlin Mann:

You a big fan of aggressive IP enforcement? Like to think a well-litigated market is a healthy market? Hate those little entrepreneurial nuisances like “competition from emerging media?”

Well, then, you would have loved the early 20th century. Because you had to get Thomas Edison’s permission to make any movie. Then you had to pay him.

Also via Merlin, check out the license agreement on this 1908 Edison wax cylinder. (Gorgeous type, though.)

 ★ 

Mozilla’s next-generation JavaScript engine is based partly on WebKit’s, and sounds like a very clever design overall.

 ★ 

If you’re not hooked by the end of the second paragraph you might as well stop there.

 ★ 

Birdfeed, Buzz Andersen’s outstanding iPhone Twitter client, has been purchased by Brizzly, updated, and rebranded as Brizzly for iPhone — and is now available from the App Store as a free download. There are some nice additions (such as the addictive pull-down-to-refresh gesture introduced by Tweetie), but a few steps back as well, including the loss of Birdfeed’s visual charm.

My main gripe is that it’s not a direct Twitter client any longer. Rather than sign in to Twitter, you sign in with an account at Brizzly. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you must hook them up to your Brizzly account. I don’t see any benefit to this, but I do see an extra potential point of failure. The deal breaker for me, alas, is that they seem to have eliminated Birdfeed’s Instapaper support.

On the upside: our long national nightmare of conflating Birdfeed and Birdhouse is now over.

 ★ 

Four years.

 ★ 

This evening, we were joined by more than 50 participating companies to announce the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, a new online storefront that enables millions of Google Apps administrators to discover and purchase integrated third party cloud applications and deploy them to their domains.

Adding an application from the Marketplace to your domain is simple - it only takes four clicks. Applications can then be easily managed from your domain's control panel and accessed by users through the same links as the Google Apps suite.

1) Click "Add it now"
2) Agree to the vendor's Terms of Service
3) Grant access to the data that the app is requesting (ome apps require data access, some don't...so only grant access to apps you trust)
4) Turn it on and start enjoying your increased productivity

Applications listed in the Google Apps Marketplace integrate with Google Apps using open protocols. These integrations improve the efficiency of your businesses by allowing users to share data and collaborate on projects as well as connect to users' daily workflows in apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts.



This integrated app experience is available in the Marketplace today for users of Google Apps Premier, Standard and Education Editions thanks to the efforts of folks like Intuit and Atlassian, and others who are committed to join, including NetSuite and Successfactors. We are honored to work with the more than 50 partners listed below:


The Google Apps Marketplace gives software vendors access to a rapidly growing Google Apps customer base of 25 million users from 2 million businesses and universities. By embracing open standards like OpenID and OAuth, and by giving software vendors freedom of choice for both billing arrangement and hosting platform, Google makes it easy to build apps for the Google Apps Marketplace.

For a lot more detail on what this means for developers and ISVs, check out our posts on the new Google Apps Developer Blog and the Google Code Blog.

We look forward to seeing the ways in which companies leverage the applications currently in the Google Apps Marketplace in addition to the apps to come in the future. In fact, we'll be exploring these topics further at Google I/O on May 19-20 in San Francisco. We hope you'll join us!

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise team

“What’s in the David Foster Wallace Archive?”, from Meredith Blake at The New Yorker:

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”

Great slide show at the end, too.

 ★ 

First-hand report from Tandy Trower, the product manager at Microsoft who shipped Windows 1.0 and 2.0. Great stuff.

 ★ 

Jeff Richardson on the story behind the photo that serves as the iPhone’s default wallpaper.

 ★ 

My pick as the greatest rock album ever made. Don’t miss: Andy Greene interviews Mick and Keith on the new release. Keith:

Also, it’s the first album with no particular single on it, you know? There was no “Brown Sugar” or whatever. We made it as an album, rather than looking for a hit single.

 ★ 

Wolf Rentzsch:

I hope section 7.3 comes back to bite Apple during their Department of Justice investigation.

 ★ 

New weblog by Theis Søndergaard, featuring scanned pages from old issues of Wired:

This blog is not intended to be just a point-and-laugh central, picking apart the mistakes of the past and ridiculing those who got it wrong. You won’t have to look long for posts that do that, of course… but the main purpose of this blog is to put the past into perspective. In the fast paced world of tech, we often lure ourselves into believing that everything is different now, and old rules don’t apply. Well, quite often they do (if not always) and checking out our collective tech-past can help us get a perspective on the present.

So good.

 ★ 

Andrew Wilkinson:

I don’t understand why companies think that they can get away with doing this. The internet is a surprisingly small place, and we were notified almost immediately. We’ve all had a good chuckle about this, but we’ve contacted Mozilla and demanded that they take the design down.

Really does seem bizarre that anyone thought this wouldn’t be noticed.

Update: Mozilla apologizes, and is “actively investigating how this happened to ensure that it does not happen again.”

 ★ 

New from Cameron Moll: the Roman Coliseum rendered in type.

 ★