Im working on a small flash game for fun and discovered some odd things when testing between platforms. I develop on a MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz dual core) but found that even though I set my target framerate to 100fps the game never achieves this, I usually get closer to 60fps. However, If I set my target framerate to 60, I get closer to 40. Somewhat odd.
I was concerned that if performance was slow on my computer It would be much worse on an older one, so I decided to test the game out on a slower PC (1.7 GHz single core) to make sure it could keep up. I was shocked to discover that it achieved an average of 98fps! Not only that but the game only used about 10-15% of the CPU, where as the game uses close to 60% of BOTH of my MacBook Pro cores.
It seems that Adobe has done one hell of a job optimizing Flash for Windows and is really lagging on the Mac end. I hope that Flash 10 will bring equal performance on each platform. At least for the time being I can rest assured knowing that if the game runs well on my computer it will run damn well on most PCs out there.
FYI, I had the latest developer debug build of Flash installed on each machine.
Fortune ran a great article showcasing “The best advice I ever got” featuring advice from Larry Page, Michael Bloomberg, Indra Nooyi, Elon Musk, Craig Newmark, Tina Fey and many others. A quick and worthwhile read.
Andrew Chen runs an awesome blog about all sorts of useful web/tech entreprenurial stuff. Recently he made two posts that I wish I had read a year ago when doing financial projections for Fantasy Congress. My own limited experience running a web startup for a year can second what Andrew is saying.
While Im at this I should also mention a post made by Guy Kawasaki which outlines the projections vs real costs that Redfin.com incurred during its first two years.
In iTunes if you want to show only songs with 3 stars or higher simply type *** into the search bar, **** for 4-star or better, you get the point. This can be paired with other things in the search box like “Vampire Weekend ***” which will then show all Vampire Weekend songs with three or more stars. Saves a lot of fuss creating smart playlists just for stars.
The only thing now keeping the search box from becoming perfect in my opinion would be a OR function. It really pisses me off that I can’t type in “Vampire Weekend || MGMT” to show songs from only those two bands. Who the hell uses |’s in their song titles anyways? Even better would be a way to add filters, like the new search in OS X 10.5 Leopard. Maybe one day…
Now that I’ve started complaining about iTunes I might as well mention my biggest gripe, no good way to queue songs! Winamp did this amazingly well. Say Im listening to music and wanted to listen to a particular song next. All I had to do was select that song and push ‘Q’ (or something like that). That song would then have a little ‘1′ next to it indicating that it was next up. I could continue adding songs like that to my heart content. Winamp also had a nice little quick search like Quicksilver, which allowed me to type the name of a song and push some key to queue it, which made the process even faster. iTunes does have queueing in the party shuffle, but it really sucks. It only works if I am listening to the party shuffle playlist, and if not, I have to take the time to pick my current playlist in party shuffle and then re-play the song I am currently listening to so that I can queue the next song… big pain in the ass. Also there is no quick way to search my library although I have a feeling there might be a way to do this in Quicksilver (I dont quite like the built in iTunes plugin).
If any of you know a way around these issues please let me know.
Here are some awesome bands that you should listen to. Hopefully Ill make posts like this somewhat regularly so that you can always keep up with music that I think is cool.
MGMT: Hard to categorizes since their songs are all over the place, but all are cool
Vampire Weekend: South African beats + indie rock = awesome
Chester French - New band I heard at the Facebook party at SXSW, they were awesome live. Unfortunately they dont have many recordings at this point, but keep an eye out for them.
One of the more famous sketches featured the cast “going out for an English” after a few lhassis. They mispronounce the waiter’s name, order the blandest thing from the menu (apart from one of them, who opts for the safer option of a curry) and ask for 24 plates of chips. This parodies the often-drunk English people “going out for an Indian”, ordering chicken phall and too many papadums. This sketch was recently voted the 6th Greatest Comedy Sketch.
I have been shying away from using Google contacts despite how nice it would be to have my contacts online. The main reason being that I didn’t want to maintain a contact list that wouldn’t sync with my phone, and I was scared of having all my information stuck in one proprietary system. Not anymore.
Im excited to see what applications will start using the API, specifically I am looking forward to a Apple Address Book sync so I can sync Gmail contacts with my iPhone. Another cool application would be one that allows syncing between corporate Google Apps accounts, that way two co-workers could share a common pool of contacts.
Burritos better watch out!
I haven’t had a real burrito in a month so I plan on hitting Freebirds in Austin when at SXSW and then my local favorites when I’m back home in San Diego for a bit. Expect a burrito report and a big belly soon.
Fortune ran a great article showcasing 
Cool new trick I just learned:
