iPad 2 teardown

iPad 2 Wi-Fi Teardown

Rounded Rect PB filter for After Effects

Creative Workflow Hacks has a free PixelBender Rounded Rect Generator for After Effects. You can generate a Shape layer with a rounded Rectangle Path, but this might be faster and you get some Steve Jobs folklore on rectangles with rounded corners!

See also Expanding masks & rounded buttons.

Jobs: 'No worries. FCP is alive and well.'

Following up on the Twitter on Apple layoffs of 40 of the Pro Apps team, Mac Soda reports an iPhone message from a Steve Jobs:

"No worries. FCP is alive and well."

That's good news, but not surprising since the jobs cuts apparently weren't in Cupertino! Mac Soda's previous post on The State of Final Cut wasn't convincing about "timming the fat" -- "40 people weren’t doing a good job." But who knows, maybe the boosters will find their way back into the outback of the infinite loop.

For something ridiculous, see Apple's Influence on Visual Arts is Rotting to the Core from Jason Perlow on ZD Net.

Lone Twitter: Apple lays off 40 of Final Cut team

Only one report so far (not double counting):

"Apple laid off 40 of my old Final Cut team yesterday, lots of good people, despite high profits."

By the way, Pete Warden, who once released free AE filters, was featured on ReadWriteWeb a few days ago in The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul.

Update: The post isn't wrong -- it just reported a Twitter item. And while it doesn't mean that Final Cut is doomed, it is interesting that Pro App teams in LA and Austin seems to have been cut confidently before NAB. Then again Adobe laid off about 600 workers in 2008 and another 680 in 2009 (about 9% of its workforce each time).

By the way Pete Warden's filters haven't worked in recent versions of AE (they were released before he worked at Apple), but they are open source so someone can build on them.

Snow Leopard requires AE 9.0.2 and deactivation

It turns out that Snow Leopard requires After Effects 9.0.2, and you do lose an activation credit so deactivating is advised.

For Photoshop & other products, John Nack is a good source of information on updates.

Updating from the earlier post Snow Leopard, AE, QT, and Quartz Composer 4, see the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review by John Siracusa -- QuickTime is dealt with on page 6 and page 16 of like 23 (via johnmontfx).

Chris Meyer has a good overview in Snow Leopard: Hopes, Misunderstandings, and Gotchas.

Update: Todd Kopriva notes plug-ins and Snow Leopard: Toolfarm provides compatibility table.

25 years of using gamma 1.8

A comment on John Nack's blog post Why your Web content will look darker on Snow Leopard explains the origin of the old Mac gamma. While the gamma change is hardly news to After Effects users, there's more in the post, like a quote by Adobe Principal Scientist Lars Borg, "the movie studios' Digital Cinema Initiative selected a gamma of 2.6 as providing the best perceptual quality for 12-bit cinema projection" now in home theater.

Ted Dillard (11:19 AM on September 4, 2009; trimmed here): '... I think I got it from as near the "horse's mouth" as you can- Bill Atkinson, who not only pioneered ColorSync, but built QuickDraw and helped develop the first laser printer for Apple.

The story he tells is that they were trying to get the Laserwriter to print close to what the screen was showing- in monochrome, mind you, and the only way they could get it to work was to jack the gamma to 1.8. In his words... "it was the silliest thing."

Color Management wasn't even a thought at the time, and it set the stage for decades of Color Management mismatch and confusion. I asked him about it because I read a story about gamma, and that, back in the mid-90s this team took a bunch of cards and tested them- Mac and PC, and they all tested out to around 2.1 - 2.2.'

Fun maybe just for me, I resold a copy of Bill Atkinson's photography book Within the Stone to Aardvaark Books in San Francisco last year; it was inscribed by a Bill Atkinson to the Dalai Lama.

iPhone and other gadget teardowns

MacVideo has a nice feature video in Tearing apart the new iPhone 3GS: Interview with Kyle Wiens from ifixit.com:

"The iPhone 3GS has only just been released and already people are tearing it apart. We caught up with Kyle Wiens, CEO of ifixit.com and documented the opening up the new iPhone and a breakdown component by component to find out exactly what this thing is made of. This provides a rare glimpse into the way Apple manufacture their technology and reveals secrets such as processor speed and other possibilities for those who love to investigate technology."

ifixit.com, a Mac-oriented parts resource with repair guides, has more user-contributed sneak peeks inside the hottest new gadgets on their iPhone and other Gadget Teardowns page.

Not all interesting teardowns have video; see for example Teardown: Inside Cisco's Flip UltraHD digital camcorder.

Apparently teardowns are new class of tech reporting. Similar phone teardown are featured by phoneWreck. Here's another iPhone 3Gs Teardown from Teardown TV, a series just starting from EE Times:

Macbreak: Studio, a new podcast on Mac video

Macbreak: Studio is a new podcast (iTunes) from Pixelcorps covering all Mac pro apps (Apple and otherwise):

"Join Steve Martin, Mark Spencer, Brian Gary, Alex Lindsay and friends as they reveal the ins and outs of video production on the Mac. From 3D to audio, video, and compression, learn from the experts how to add advanced techniques to your production workflow and a professional touch to your video content."

Macbreak: Dev is coming next week...

Snow Leopard and Multiple Processors

Larry Jordan has a few thoughts on the next year's version of Mac OS, Snow Leopard, in his latest newsletter (via SF Cutters):

"...one of the dirty little secrets of OS X: more processors do not mean faster speed from the same application...

This is what the recent announcement of the next version of OS X seeks to fix... However, there's a down-side to this as well. According to initial reports, Snow Leopard will only support Intel/Mac computers... Older applications that rely on those Carbon libraries, like Final Cut Pro and many others, will need to be massively rewritten to support the new operating system...

Snow Leopard requires Apple to rewrite FCP in a big way - this is just as major an effort as getting Final Cut to work on Intel/Mac's in the first place; probably bigger. This kind of major rewrite in a program's life comes along only rarely. With luck, Apple will use it for more than just achieving compatibility. It is my hope that Apple will use this opportunity to fix a lot of the long-standing bugs and weirdness in the program, as well as finally turn some attention to improving the interface."

There's more background on Snow Leopard at Macworld, and tidbits on the promised QuickTime X from OS X iPhone at Create Digital Motion, and Ars Technica.

Update: Apple Insider noted "Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard" by Roughly Drafted.

What it takes to beat the speed of an 8-core Mac Pro by 50%

from TG Daily, What it takes to beat the speed of an 8-core Mac Pro by 50%:

"Boxx is celebrating its 10 year anniversary this year and in order to celebrate the occasion, the company assembled an ultimate visual effects machine based on Intel’s Skulltrail platform and Core 2 Extreme processors... Boxx will be giving away one these machines at Siggraph 2008. "

Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, is Arab-American

...and maybe Jewish too, depending on your reality-distortion field. TechCrunch claims that Love Him or Hate Him, Fortune Cannot Make Up Its Mind About Steve Jobs.

I don't read Fortune magazine but I did find it interesting that I missed the news that Jobs' biological father was a Syrian Arab, who lives not too far from Cupertino. His biological mother is Joanne Carole Schieble from Wisconsin, who some think is Jewish (not that there is anything wrong with that). More articles says that his mother is German/Swiss Catholic. Some background can be found in an article from the Green Bay Press Gazette, which was re-posted in Silicon Valley Watcher.

Update: also fun is that Jobs' biological sister Mona Simpson was the inspiration for naming Homer Simpson's mother, by her boyfriend Jeff Appel who was a writer on The Simpsons.

Update: more details leaked out after Jobs' death in 2011. See especially Macworld UK's 2015 article, Who is Steve Jobs’ Syrian immigrant father, Abdul Fattah Jandali?

Hackintosh in the air

Update: Lifehacker posted this a few weeks later: OS X on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required, and No Film School is still interested in November 2010 in How to Build a Hackintosh.

Reposting something from November in honor of the new Apple laptop -- and the $400 ASUS subnotebook. But the hack is hardly headache-free. If you "don’t have SSE3 and/or recent Intel chipset, my understanding is the EFI hacks at the moment do not allow you to run an unpatched kernel, hence no updates." There can also be sundry system errors from driver malfunction, so no fancy Final Cut setups are safe, according to sources sighted at Macworld...

Actually seeing the new Apple Air does make you soften somewhat because it is nice, but Tech Thoughts hasn't touched it yet and has some good comments. Henry Norr, the former editor at MacWeek who took a brave stand at the SF Chronicle, has more thoughts. \\\


Hobbyists might enjoy building a Hackintosh -- in the sense discussed here, a PC running Mac OS assisted by "OSx86" technologies that evolved from developer kits for transitioning from the G5 to MacIntel. It seems akin to cloning the BIOS of the original IBM, and not quite the same as running a virtual machine like VMware.

Lifehacker has a walkthrough on how to Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800, and UNEASYsilence does the same for the $300 ASUS subnotebook in Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC.

I'm not sure why someone doing video would spend too much time on this, but I keep hearing about it because of the low cost of building a PC Frankenstein. You might remember that Victor Frankenstein shirked responsibility for his actions and rejected the creature out of fear; only after this neglect did the creature became a monster.

Build a Hackintosh

Hobbyists might enjoy building a Hackintosh -- in the sense discussed here, a PC running Mac OS assisted by "OSx86" technologies that evolved from developer kits for transitioning from the G5 to MacIntel. It seems akin to cloning the BIOS of the original IBM, and not quite the same as running a virtual machine like VMware.

Lifehacker has a walkthrough on how to Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800, and UNEASYsilence does the same for the $300 ASUS subnotebook in Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC.

I'm not sure why someone doing video would spend too much time on this, but I keep hearing about it because of the low cost of building a PC Frankenstein. You might remember that Victor Frankenstein shirked responsibility for his actions and rejected the creature out of fear; only after this neglect did the creature became a monster.

Gates: NOT Fake Steve Jobs

Engadget has the scoop on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sharing a stage; 7-part video at Wall Street Journal:



Update: the talk is now on iTunes too.

Apple Mac Pro reviews

AnandTech has a 20 page review of Apple's Mac Pro -- "A True PowerMac Successor."

See also the slightly older Ars Technica's review and HD For Indies' meta review blog on Mac Pro.
.

Slow Windows XP emulation

via the AE-List:

Mac OS X Hints has a submission on how to fix slowness of Parallels Desktop running Windows XP on a MacBook. EvidentlyVM paging occurs even with 2GB of RAM because of caching and flushing memory routines. The reader developed a fix called PD Tweaker, a tiny plugin for Unsanity's Application Enhancer that loads only in Parallels Desktop.
.

I stumbled across what you didn't hear from Apple

Found text:

"Here's a bit of what you didn't hear from Apple regarding their new Intel-based iMac and MacBook computers.

Applications compiled for the PowerPC processor will run 5-10 times slower on a MacTel computer. Performance of many useful programs on a MacTel will approximate the performance obtained on a 300MHz Blueberry iBook (average eBay price, $300). If you want to run heavier duty apps on your new MacTel system, you'll probably want to install windows XP and purchase the Windows XP versions.

Large applications not built using Apple's compiler will require a large engineering effort in order to run natively on a MacTel system [especially difficult is Assembly code]. If it were easy, important apps would have already been native MacTel software."
-------------
Comments:
-------------
This most likely was the development hardware not the Intel Core Duo "Yonah" chips. From Job's demo it looks a bit faster. Maybe Adobe will have surprises for NAB, but Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen commented to CNET.com in August 2005: "If you look at our product cycles for products like Photoshop and Creative Suite, they tend to be in the 18- to 24-month cycle, which means that you're talking about either Q4 of '06 or Q1 of '07."