Tron Legacy : first trailer

The first trailer of Tron Legacy is available at Apple site (HD version). It features the original main actor, Jeff Bridge (plays as the main character’s father), and the original volontary minimalist graphic style (however full of abstract power and symbolic). It seems very well done (also for the music), and the movie is expected for 2010. Meanwhile we can play at Tron 2 game, that was released some years ago and still succeeded going farther than the original movie, by providing even more inspiring graphics, music (great) and plot.

Star Wars : The Force Unleashed soon on mac

Aspyr and LucasArts announced they will release Star Wars : The Force Unleashed on Mac and PC this fall (it has been out on console since September, 2008). This extended version (Ultimate Sith Edition) will include three additional levels.

Logic Pro 9 : PPC compatible and faster

Logic Pro 9 (and then Logic Express 9) indeed works perfectly on a PowerPC mac (universal binary application). Moreover it seems performing ways better than Logic 8 (by using more efficiently distributed load accross CPU cores), so running it on a G4 shouldn’t be a problem :
For the record, LP9 is up and running on my G5 Quad. While I’ve yet to fully test functionality or Mainstage 2 fort hat matter, I can say that the upgrade process ran smoothly.
I’m editing a large project at the moment and I’ve not yet run into any issues. One thing I can say is that all 4 processors in my Quad seem to be better utilized than under LP8. Load looks very evenly distributed.

PPC and Logic 9 works…trust me. I’m running it right now– and I’ve worked on three large projects just today.
In terms of MASSIVE performance improvements; I’m a bit stumped. My G5 Quad is running at about half CPU in a plugin intensive session containing about 46 tracks (32 MIDI). Disk I/O load is also about nill. Memory is at about 75% utilization.

UPDATE : as stated through below links, Logic Express is Intel binary only starting 9.1.1 update (the updates won’t apply on PowerPC).

iPhone : Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition

LucasArts released its first game at the AppStore, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (7,99$), that will also be out on PC. It is an enhanced version of the original game (graphics and musics), however the finer and antialiased scenes seem less warm, with less color and less symbolic (to be verified by real play as enhanced sound, visual effects and touch control could also make the game liver).
We are expecting Full Throttle, The Dig, and Sam & Max. We could also use ScummVM on iPhone (jailbreak required) in order to use most original LucasArts games, and other : Discworld, Discworld 2, Sierra games, Return to Zork, The 7th Guest, etc.

Steinberg The Grand 3

Steinberg presents The Grand 3. Besides Yamaha C7, Bosendorger 290 and Steinway D, this new version includes a Yamaha CP80 electric piano and an upright Nordiska Pianofabriken piano. An Ecco mode allows to reduce memory and CPU usage, and a samples purge feature has been added. It also features a new convolution reverb. Audio demos are available. The install requires 32 Gb and it is priced 350 euros.

Logic Studio & Express 9

Apple unveiled Logic Studio 9 et Logic Express 9. As we can see Logic Express gains most of the Studio verison features and plugins : FlexTime, advanced Midi and audio editing, surround mix, AmpDesigner (25 amps, 25 speaker cabinets, 3 mics), Pedalboard (30 stompboxes), SpaceDesigner, EXS24 (the whole install now requires 8 Gb, however sound effects and surround sounds from the Studio version aren’t included). The Sculpture instrument also does not seem to be provided in the Express version.

The specifications page states that Logic Express and Studio now require an Intel mac, however it might still work on a PowerPC (if universal binary), despite it not being officially supported.

Apple valued more than Google

After having announced record results (with a gross margin of 36 percents), Apple’s value now exceeds Google’s one (140 billions $ vs 135). We are waiting for next generation of Intel processors that will bring the new AVX vector engine, in order to finally get the audio (and video) processing power that have still been provided by Motorola G4’s Altivec for 10 years. I was present at its launch during the 1999 keynote at Paris’s Palais des Sports (Apple and Bungie also unveiled during the show the first video of Halo… that was planned for mac only – that was before Microsoft acquired Bungie) !

Modartt Pianoteq Rock piano add-on

Modartt presents Rock piano, an add-on (29$) that brings 3 new pop/rock pianos : YC5 Stage, YC5 Chamber and YC5 Studio. Audio demos are available, and the extension is provided for free with Pianoteq 3 until end of September.

Kontakt 3.5 available : 64 bits adressing on OSX

Kontakt 3.5 is available. As stated in the previous beta, this update brings support for 64 bits addressing, in order to bypass the 4Gb samples memory limit. Under MacOSX this feature is allowed thanks to NI’s Memory Server, a separate non GUI process (Unix/BSD 64 bits) that communicates with the Kontakt plugin (such trick was used in EastWest’s PLAY player), and then also works on Tiger (only Leopard allows GUI processes to use 64 bits modes – on Tiger only non GUI processes are allowed to. Moreover since Leopard the Carbon 64 bits APIs have been dropped, and we have to use Cocoa to gain 64 bits addressing).
Thanks to this solution the 64 bits mode also works when the Kontakt plugin is hosted in a 32 bits sequencer (Logic, ProTools). The DFD mode has also been enhanced (uses less memory).

Access Control for Cross-Site Requests

On theMozilla site we can find an article about support for Access Control for Cross-Site Requests in Firefox 3.5. This recommandation submitted to W3C allows to circumvent the same orgin policy limitation in a secure way, in order to provide cross-domain access using XMLHttpRequest (then no need for JSONP). The principle is to specify, through new headers, the origin for client requests, and allowed origins in server’s responses (requires an additional initial request, managed automatically by Firefox, in the same way as with native browser digest authentication – the unique XMLHttpRequest object is reused automatically by the browser to send the original data once access rights are checked). It also allows to manage cookies (unavailable using JSONP).

WebKit CSS 3D Transforms & Leopard / Flash demise ?

We can discover on the WebKit site a new demo that features CSS 3D Transforms : Poster Circles. We could also see Snow Stack demo at satine.org, and Animated CSS3 Cube at fofronline.com. The CSS 3D Transforms have been available on the iPhone WebKit since iPhone OS 2.0 (hardware accelerated), and more recently on the Snow Leopard WebKit. Now this feature is available also on the latest WebKit nightly builds for Leopard (still not present in Safari 4 – previously only CSS 2D Transforms were provided). Apple submitted this CSS extension to W3C (contrary to Microsoft whose Silverlight features are closed, and Adobe whose container is even more proprietary and opaque).

This year, enhancements in Apple’s WebKit (also promoted by Google – used in Chrome) – CSS Effects and recently WebSockets -, HTML5 (audio and video tags, javascript database, application cache, subprocesses), and Mozilla’s Canvas (Canvas 3D JS Libary) – and Google’s O3D, seem to indicate the upcoming demise of Flash (and of Silverlight probably shortly thereafter). Flash will then never be available on iPhone, even considering Adobe may decide this time (because has no other choice) to bring an optimized Flash version (performances of Flash are really bad on MacOSX, and not that great on Windows). In Snow Leopard we can now see Safari subprocesses (created by plugins) and see how much CPU Flash uses (too much, even on Windows).

CP2JavaWS 0.8 : Direct2CP Master/Detail view

A new version of CP2JavaWS is available. Besides enhancements for CPTableViewDelegate and bug fixes, it brings a Direct2CP mode (Direct2Java like for CP client), that allows to display a Master/Detail view, by simply providing the CP elements class name (and additional selection criteria for the master table if needed) :

– refactored the request management (mode switch, CPURLConnection/CPJSONP creation, delegate and auth. delegate creation, encoding and decoding) in a new class, CP2JavaWSHttpSender, as it is used by both CPRemoteService and CP2JavaWSTableViewDelegate. The CP2JavaWSHttpSender allows to specify if call arguments have to be encoded (CP to js conversion before js to JSON), and if result has to be decoded (js to CP after JSON to js).

– For remote service methods that have generic argument types (Object), we can now pass to the CP2JavaWSHttpSender an array of generic parameters indexes (required as on the Java server side we then cannot discover the generic Object type from the passed parameter value).

– reponses with error code didn’t trigger anymore the failHandler since CPURConnection doesn’t check anymore for error codes (in order to allow to perform action depending on the error code).

– fixed a problem in Decoder, where empty Date on JS object was setted as undefined on the CP object instead of null, and where JS boolean fields with false value where treated as unset.

– CP2JavaWSTableViewDelegate can now be used in two modes : in the first mode the full CP objects are returned for each requested row (slower but we then still have the full object if we select it for editing in the detail view – then no need for additional read request).
In the second mode the return (for a row) is a tab of values (each value is the final attribute corresponding to the specified attribute path – setted as the column’s id), that is faster (attributes paths are passed to the select HQL request – faster than a select *, and no decoding occurs on the client side – result encoding to JSON on the server side is also faster) but requires an additional read for editing. In both cases the displayed values correspond to the columns’ ids, and can be nested attributes paths.

– a new object, CP2JavaWSMasterDetailView allows to display and manage automatically a Master/Detail view for a specified CP business class (sort of a Direct2CP, that uses CP2JavaWSTableViewDelegate). We can specify specific attributes paths to display in the master view (tableView), as we may want to display only a few of those (and the whole attributes values in the detail view). If not precised, the master view will display a column for each attribute (the elements CP class ivars are introspected recursively – so we get a column for each nested CP object’s attributes).
endPoint1 = [CP2JavaWSEndPoint createForURL:"http://host/appName/endpointName"];
var masterDetailView = [CP2JavaWSMasterDetailView createForEndPoint:endPoint1 elementsClassName:"MyCustomClass" idAttName:"customerId" masterAttributes:["customerId", "name", "age"] criterias:nil rect:CGRectMake(x, y, w, h)];
Depending on the attribute type (string/integer, boolean, date) the detail view adds a CPTextField, CPCheckBox, etc. To use combo lists for some attributes values editing,  a next update will allow to specify RemoteValuesListDescriptors, that will store the endpoint (if different) and remote services (if many) that return the corresponding combo lists values.
By clicking on a row in the master view (tableView), the detail view fields are automatically filled. The detail view contains a Modify button, that automatically calls the generic RemoteDAOService to update the object.
We can pass a custom detail view if needed (that will have to implement some delegate methods to fill the editing fields, and use the provided DetailViewDelegate for changes submission).

Note : the Objective-J/preprocess.js (or Frameworks/Objective-J/Objective-J.js) has to be modified using the provided file changes in order to manage ivar types (required for the new MasterDetail view).