Adobe has released a public beta of Flash 9 with CoreGraphics rendering support on Mac OS X. Trunk has support for CoreGraphics plugin rendering, so if you’re using a trunk nightly of either Camino or Firefox you’ll benefit from this.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/
Adobe did a great job and it was a pleasure working with them to make this happen on Gecko!
I just finished reading The Plague by Albert Camus. It is a pretty brilliant book despite its not being very exciting. There are more than a few parts that make the somewhat boring stretches worthwhile, including this part that warmed the optimistic part of me:
”I understand,” Paneloux said in a low voice. “That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.”
Rieux straightened up slowly. He gazed at Paneloux, summoning to his gaze all the strength and fervor he could muster against his weariness. Then he shook his head.
”No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”
A shade of disquietude crossed the priest’s face. “Ah, Doctor,” he said sadly, “I’ve just realized what is meant by grace.”
I got home today from a fantastic but tiring 10-day trip to the bay area. So much happened that the idea of blogging about all of it makes my fingers ache so I’m just going to write about a few things.
WWDC was pretty good despite the so-so keynote. I learned a lot about Xcode 3, dtrace and its front-end app Xray, and the future of Mac OS X in terms of APIs and system architecture. However, as usual, WWDC is all about the people you spend time getting to know between the sessions. I got some good advice about Mac OS X gecko issues and I was able to help some people with NPAPI plugins on Mac OS X. I was told by multiple people I hadn’t met before that they read my blog and I’m flattered – hi guys!
On Saturday and Sunday I drove down to the valley during the day to attend the Camino meetup. It was basically a 10-hour presentation/discussion led by Mike Pinkerton, and I think it was pretty productive. I certainly feel more informed about the state of the project and it was great to meet a lot of the newer Camino hackers and community members. Mike Pinkerton announced that he has a 50,000 line patch ready to go that makes Camino use WebKit instead of Gecko, and he’s going to land it next week. I was all like r++++++… Just kidding! Sorry Dave.
Of course no WWDC week and following weekend would be complete without some nights out on the town and 2007 was no exception. Food-wise, the theme for this trip was Italian – I had so many big, wonderful Italian meals that I probably won’t need to eat for the next week. Fresh tomatoes and mozarella, ravioli stuffed with pumpkin and mustard fruit and amaretti, papardelle pasta with mushroom white sauce and pine nuts, gnocchi, polenta with sauteed mushrooms, and bottles of Chianti and Peroni. We managed to find restaurants with excellent charismatic servers, a critical part of any great Italian meal. Saturday I went to a speakeasy-style party at a house on a hill near Haight-Ashbury. Everyone dressed up, there was lots of dancing and a balcony that overlooked half the city from on high – quite a sight at night.
I spent Monday at the office and flew home today (Tuesday). I’m really tired now. Strangely enough, after such a fun week, I’m looking forward to sitting at home fully rested and coding every day for the next while. I actually miss doing that already!
I flew out to San Francisco today for WWDC. The flight was awesome for two reasons. First of all, I watched Dirty Dancing for the first time during the flight and it was wonderful. It was hard to not just start dancing in my seat! Secondly, I had been listening to Annie this morning before the flight and then a couple behind me on the plane started singing “The sun’ll come out, tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun!” (from Annie, if you didn’t know) to calm down their screaming child. It was so cute – I wanted to just start crying with the kid.
I’m pretty excited for WWDC tomorrow. I’m glad the iPhone was previously announced and most of its features were already publicly disclosed because I’d personally like to see the focus on Mac OS X 10.5, and it looks like that’s what we’re going to get. I cleaned out some space on my laptop so I can install the beta first thing in the morning after Steve Jobs’ talk and get Firefox building/running on 10.5 (again).
Apple always does a great job making sure that WWDC is an awesome experience for the attendees and I’m sure this year will be no different. I’ll probably write more about it here as things happen. Time to get some sleep!
I’ve been listening to a lot of musicals for the past two months, thanks to John Lilly though he doesn’t know it. One day at the Mozilla offices I accidentally started listening to a musical that he had on his shared iTunes and I loved it.
So far my favorite three musicals, in order, are Annie, Hair, and Rent. Hair was my most recent discovery, fantastic. I’m ready to get another, anybody have a recommendation?
