By scott
Maybe I am the only one out there who didn’t know this feature existed on a Mac but I stumbled upon it tonight. As a Flash Developer I am constantly watching the CPU usage when I am QAing my work. I am also constantly fighting for screen real estate.As developers we have all experienced memory leaks, have accidently forgot to delete intervals or even worse ENTER_FRAMEs, or have tried to implement an animation where the animator went a little crazy with some filters. Prior to Flex 3’s Profiler us Mac users had to open our Activity Monitor and try to jam it in the corner of the screen where we can see the browsers CPU Usage column through all the other windows open. Tonight I figured out how to show the CPU Usage in the dock.
- First open the Activity Monitor
- Right Click (or click and hold, or CTRL click) on the Activity Monitor icon in the dock and select ‘Keep in Dock’ (if it’s not already there)
- Right click on the Activity Monitor icon again and select the ‘dock icons’ menu
- From the ‘dock icons’ menu select the ‘Show CPU Usage’ item
- There you have it, a nice little visual representation of your CPU usage, it is even separated by cores (if applicable)
Like I said at the beginning of this post, a lot of you probably already knew this and stopped reading this post after the first sentence. However I do know there are a lot of developers switching to Mac, so this Bud’s for you…err…post’s for you.
By scott
Not sure if this is a known issue, or a known fix (workaround). It’s a weird one. For whatever reason, I was getting no sound when test publishing (Command Enter) from the Flash IDE. I also noticed I wasn’t getting any sound when viewing a quicktime video. So I decided to scour the web for a solution. I found one.
Turns out all you have to do is open up GarageBand, create a new project, play a few notes on the piano (I chose Beethoven’s 5th, followed by Push It by Salt n Pepa - I don’t think these songs had anything to do with the fix), close GarageBand, and viola, sound again in the Flash Player and Quicktime.
I’m not sure why this works. Does anyone out there know why? Or better yet, does anyone know a proper fix for this? Mr. Jobs, are you reading my blog?
By scott
Ok, I haven’t blogged about this yet, and I know everyone else and their grandma already has. Heck, it was even mentioned on my local cable access station. So now it is my turn to drop in my 2 cents. I can sum it up in one word, well two but then this blog wouldn’t be rated PG. WOW! And 3 other words I want one!!!!We all know the features of this amazing piece of hardware so I won’t list them again here but I will mention a few. The touch screen, finally something that makes sense, I have always hated the archiac keypads on modern day phones, I remember getting my first touch tone phone, probably circa 1984. So the touch screen interface only makes sense, and exactly what Steve Jobs said, software now drives the interface, software is not limited to the hardware. And the only con I can think of, is it is one more mechanical thing that can die, basically if the touch screen dies, your foobard. Other than a few battery issues with early iPods I can’t think of any other serious mac hardware issues, and personally mac software interfaces are, and have always be cutting edge.
The other thing I am excited to announce, which hasn’t been released to the mainstream (that I know of) is it looks like Flash will be included on the iPhone. Since Safari is on the phone, the flash plug-in will be included. It doesn’t say if it will be Flash Lite 2.0 or the full version. part of me thinks it would be Flash Lite, but if it is running a full version of Safari and a full version of OSX, maybe it will be Flash 9 included. This would open up a whole other can of worms in the mobile universe. Actionscript 3 for your mobile application. Does anyone have a definitive answer on this? I would hope people wouldn’t start creating massive Flex applications for a mobile device because they could. I found the Flash information on this forum. Again, don’t know if it is just a rumour, but still, it’s very exciting!! See, I need one for QA purposes!!
As you can see, I’m pumped about this phone. IMAP email (yay Yahoo!), full iPod, 2 megapixel camera, ok, that could be better, but its still decent, better than my 0.5 megapixel phone camera I have now. Ok I’ll stop, I said I wouldn’t spew all the features.
Stay tuned, I will be in Silicon Valley in less than two weeks, and I will definitely be bragging on here the second I get one. Heck, I will probably be writing the post from my iPhone, if that’s the name they’ll legally be able to use. Heck, I wouldn’t care if it was named Pile o’ Shiznatt, I would still want one. In my opinion, Cisco, you can keep the name. It’s not the lowercase i that makes this phone awesome.
