Mhackintosh blog

I am reading the extraordinary review of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard by Ars Technica, and I am astonished by how much insight they give into the OS I am using each and every day, having a writer that go deep into technical things (real technical!), and at the same time make it simple to understand. For example OpenCL.

I like the explanation of the “intent” mechanism on QTKit (QuickTime framework), as “intent” for me is a key on future libraries and frameworks to communicate application future behavior and needs to Operating System, to help it optimize resources (including power consumption) on-the-fly knowing the real needs of each application/process/threads. This is an interesting trend!

Naturally you will need technical background to understand it, but for me it’s worth reading for anyone developing or planning to develop, maintain, deploy Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

PS: don’t forget to read Ars technica review of Mac OS X 10.5 leopard before, it’s worthwhile too and many technologies included in Leopard might surprise you, such as LLVM!

Adobe just added hardware support to play H.264 on Mac OS X computers. This is a good new, but for me it’s another reason to refuse to have Flash on iOS (iPod Touch, iPhone & iPad).

As a meta-platform (cross-hardware platform), Flash evolve a different speed depending on the target patform (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, …), it’s Adobe that decide which platform will be supported and what will be supported on each platform.

Adobe doesn’t support major distributions of Linux for example. That’s Adobe choice, not Linux user choice, or Linux distribution maker choice.

Adobe choose when to implement new features, including hardware acceleration, optimizations, or security patch, depending on the platform.

With this long-awaited feature, hardware acceleration of H.264 HD videos on Mac OS X, with a limited set of Mac supported, Adobe upgraded Flash with limited support of thsi feature (compared to PC with supported video cards, some unsupported on Mac OS X version of Flash), and lately. This give a competitive advantage of the Windows platform for Flash users.

Apple doesn’t want a third-party to decide if and when features must be added, optimizations should be done (they are NOT on done correctly for Flash on Mac OS X), and moreover a meta-platform maker deciding to give competitive advantage to another platform.

I fully understand the choice of Steve Jobs concerning Flash on iOS, and support it. Even if Flash was fast (it isn’t), reliable (lol), or adapted to multi-touche screen, accepting it is letting Adobe decide of the future of the iOS platform!

I was in vacation in Amsterdam, with Data Roaming OFF (default setting), to avoid paying 10 000$ or more to my carrier (Canadian Rogers).

From my iPad, I tried to use geolocalization of my iPhone and it didn’t work. So I decided to check if I could Lock it with a password. And thus didn’t worked either!

To have Geolocalization of an iPhone or Locking (also Wiping/resetting) in foreign countries, you absolutely need DATA ROAMING that is the best way to end-up with a montruous bill from your cellphone carrier! These features, presented as really great, and mandatory in some countries, are juste unavailable on default setting (that is safe for your wallet!).

Hey Apple, rework it, it should work by SMS too, even if I have to use a special password on MobileMe to use these features!

PS: Locking was effectively done 10 days later, when I was back on Canada, on Trudeau Airport. Totally useless, and false security for travellers!

It’s usual for Apple to castrate the GPU of the Graphic Card, on iMac and laptops…

Previous iMac with reduced frequency and low-cost graphic memory (VRAM), laptops with down-clocked GPU, premium price but low-cost parts. And performance lagging far-behind half-cost PC!

This time, it’s the Radeon HD 5670, that ATI specify for GDDR5 with 64GB/s bandwidth. Only GDDR5. Apple put GDDR3 on it to attain 32GB/s, diminishing performance on a 1.5X to 2X factor! That might be a 10$ or 20$ economy for Apple, 1% of the iMac, but a real performance loss for gamers and anyone using GPU, for OpenCL, CUDA, Photoshop CS5 Suite, …

Notice that the ATI Radeon HD 5750 of the Quad-Core 27″ iMac is in fact a HD 5850 Mobility, offering approximately same level of performance, but less bandwidth (as usual).

Steve, sometime you are really cheap!

PS: Preceding iMac 27″ Core i5 Quad-Core had ATI Radeon HD 4850 with GDDR3, but offering 64GB/s bandwidth, having 256bits bus instead the 128bits bus of the HD 5670.

I plan to move a dozen movies into my iPad, just in case, for travels, viewing them in my couch or in bed or anywhere…

I tried to encode a 720p concert (mkv/h264/ac3), with Turbo.264 HD, and it was real fast, 3X to 4X faster than handbrake encoding for the same input file. AppleTV preset in both case. Wow!

But the resulting file is still 2.4GB long, that is real big for a 87minutes footage, and will translate to 3GB per full-length movie….