Daring Fireball, on rumor that Apple’s Finder App to get Cocoa Rewrite for Snow Leopard:
Everyone out there with a stiffy for the “rewritten in Cocoa” Snow Leopard Finder needs to get a grip. Cocoa is just an API. It is not some sort of magic technology where you just sprinkle a ton of square brackets in your source code and you instantly get a better UI.
I don’t think that’s the big deal. I think the big deal is that with Apple finally facing up to a really big, nasty Carbon-to-Cocoa rewrite, they’re either going to appreciate the pain they’re insisting that their partners go through with their legacy products (Word, Photoshop, etc.), or (more optimistically) they’re going to develop tools and techniques as part of their internal transition, and make those available in some future tool or SDK.
Granted, this is the sound of me clinging to a soon-to-be-wrong prediction that Carbon would get deprecated this year:
Apple has some still-viable pre-OS X apps (iTunes anyone?) that are presumably Carbon, and with the Intel transition done, I wonder if they’re not spending the first half of 2008 converting those to Cocoa, developing needed migration tools along the way, with the intention of rolling into WWDC 2008 able to say “it’s not that hard, we did it, here’s how, and here’s stuff to help.”
Details from Gamasutra. With all the iconic design associated with the Beatles — the Yellow Submarine movie, the Sgt. Pepper concept, the B&W of “A Hard Day’s Night” or the Bond-spoof “Help!”– this could be as fascinating visually as much as anything else. Maybe “Rock Band” meets “Kingdom Hearts”, where the different Beatles eras and concepts serve as the various lands?
Since Harmonix is made up of musicians, it’s safe to assume it won’t suck like the Sgt. Pepper movie. Worst case, it’s Across the Universe, which sits unwatched in my DVR…
BTW, with rumor mongers saying for years that a deal for Beatles on iTunes was close, who would have thought that we’d see them in a game before being on iTunes or one of its rivals?
Sony announces they’re removing the PlayStation 2 content approval process, thereby making PS2 effectively an open platform.
Do you suppose this will hasten Java for PlayStation 2, promised in the JavaOne 2001 keynote?
No, of course not, but it’s fun to recall this among other J1 vaporware — anyone remember the 2004 announcement of Java for the hated and vaporous Infinium Phantom console? — as a counter to whiny little bitches who can’t get over Steve Jobs’ arguably unkept vow to make the Mac the best Java platform. Seriously, kids, half of what gets announced in keynotes never ships… get over yourselves already.
And not needing any comment from me (because the forum’s already hopping): [FYI] Sun stopped funding of SwingX.
Clever as heck idea from MacLife:
Rock Out in GarageBand with the Rock Band Drum Controller.
Makes me wish I could actually play actual instruments and use GB.
iTunes tries, and fails, to censor an obscene band name:
Since returning to GRR, I’ve let the Mac Pro run overnight, downloading 30-some WWDC 2008 videos, which just became available on Friday. At an average of 500 MB each, I’m probably burning through 15 GB of data, which means that under some bandwidth-rationing regimes, I’d be closing in on a bandwidth cap. I ranted about this before, but this is a textbook case of why the US’ broadband oligopoly is going to hurt the country in the long run: somewhere out there, there’s an iPhone developer on Comcast or AT&T who can’t get needed iPhone development info because he or she has hit an arbitrary bandwidth cap. American developers are at a disadvantage, relative to the rest of the world, thanks to the crooked arrangement of just having one or two providers (if any) in a given area, enjoying a government-protected monopoly while not being expected to provide any specific level of service.
We don’t have a single provider taking care of everyone in the public interest, nor do we enjoy the benefits of genuine competition. What we’ve got is good old fashioned US-style cronyism, something that will only get worse as the government frantically borrows more money (WTF?) to buy more of the private economy (WTF?)
Having said that… why the heck are all these videos a half gig anyways?
If you look at the previous years’ WWDC videos or similar ADC on iTunes content (Leopard Tech Talks, for example), you’ll notice that by and large, the video portion of the file is just the slides. Except for the transitions and any demos, the video portion of the presentation doesn’t move. Yet if you zoom in on the text, you’ll see a little bit of an artifact that jumps every second or so as it hits a keyframe, meaning this non-moving content has been encoded as if it were natural, moving video.
And it’s a massive waste of bandwidth. Since QuickTime supports variable frame rates, you could have a single frame (i.e., a slide) that stays up for 10 or 20 or 60 seconds, and only need the data for that frame once. Then for the next slide, you’d only need one sample, however long it is. There are slideshow-movie-maker examples for QuickTime that do exactly this (I think I even did one in QTJ a long time ago, but it’s not in the book [should have been] and I don’t know where I posted it, if I did). I suspect you could do the slides with a lossless codec, like PNG or even Animation (which is just RLE), and still get a huge space saving over the current process of re-encoding that keyframe every second, and providing B-frames (deltas) that don’t convey any information because the image doesn’t actually change.
In fact, you could still use natural video for your demos by simply having a second video track that would contain samples only for those times when you’re actually doing video. Moral of story: QuickTime creative abilities remain freaking awesome.
So why not do this? Well, obviously, the videos need to be playable on iPods and iPhones, which only support H.264 (though I’d be interested to know if H.264 can do variable frame rates… I assume it can’t, at least not in the Low Complexity profile, but it’d be a real nice feature for exactly this kind of thing). You could use the variable length samples in production — drop some PNGs on a video track in your Final Cut timeline and stretch their durations and you’re doing exactly that — but once you export, you’ll get the same constant-frame-rate H.264 that you would if you were exporting your kids’ Halloween videos. Alas.
