The <video> tag is great and all — but unfortunately fullscreen support is not ubiquitous yet, but support is in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari. It should have been supported when initially implemented (but you’ll have to trawl through the WHATWG mailing lists to see the arguments for and against).
No matter – fullscreen is an important feature, and in my work supporting a non-profit, they needed to have this feature for their members for viewing classes (which may run 1.5 to 2 hrs long), and the <video> tag in its current incarnation then with no fullscreen support just didn’t cut it.
Considering that most people don’t upgrade their browsers often, but have Flash installed already – we still needed a Flash based video player for fullscreen support. People understand most Flash video players with fullscreen buttons (thank YouTube for that), so it was not hard to educate them about this feature. The non-profit uses WordPress, so we settled on Isa Goksu’s ProPlayer [1][2] WordPress plugin which allows for customizability.
The problem was that recently, some students wanted iPhone / iPad video playback as well, and with the current Flash player, they were seeing no videos at all. We had already moved to h.264 movie file support in anticipation of this, since it is supported by the Flash player and most browser <video> tag implementations (save Firefox).
I modified the ProPlayer plugin to fallback to using the <video> tag, if Flash is not available. It works great on the iPad and the iPhone 3GS (iOS 4), but on the iPhone 3G (iOS 3.12) it cannot be played, I don’t know why.
Download the patch here . The version of the plugin that was patched is 4.7.7 (pro-player.php file only).
There are various command line ways to determine whether your machine running Snow Leopard is running the 64 or 32 bit kernel, and also the ability for you to switch kernels. I have gathered all those ways into this GUI utility that will show you what kernel you are currently running, and it will allow you to set what kernel you want to load at the next restart.
If your machine is not EFI64 capable, this utility will not work (it will check at startup). Even if your machine is EFI64 capable (some Mac Minis and MacBooks), the 64-bit kernel will not boot anyway (Apple restriction, apparently).
[UPDATE: Possible hack to get your non-sanctioned EFI64 capable machine to load K64, would be a good extension for my utility]
The utility will ask for admin privileges when you save your settings so it can set the boot arguments. To avoid any saving / admin prompts and to just close the window, just click on the red Close button on the window controls).
Download KernelSwitcher here. The full source is on Github with a MIT license.
Screenshot:
So you have Office 2003 installed in a zillion computers and you need to open those new .docx/.xlsx/.pptx files? No need to buy Office 2007…
Microsoft has given you an “upgrade” path, for free:
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
For Mac Office 2004:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=155820
Technorati Tags: open docx xlsx pptx for free
December 14th, 2008 in
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When merging, ever get the error message: Error: Entry ‘foo’ is notuptodate. Cannot merge. Two possibilities:
- You may have local changes that are not committed (so commit them!) or undo those changes.
- You may have a file that has been modified, but the contents have not been changed. ie somehow the file was ‘touch’ed. Thus git thinks that the file has been modified because its modification date has changed, but then its hash is still the same because the content hasn’t changed, so I guess it gets confused. Doing this command below updates the file stats for your repo index to flush out this second possibility:
git update-index --refresh
Technorati Tags: git merge conflict
November 30th, 2008 in
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Adobe AIR 1.5 has been released today for Mac OS X and Windows. Linux is still at version 1.1.
So what’s changed that I can see so far? I couldn’t find any release notes (yet). For one thing, Flash Player 10 is now included. For the Mac, its at version 10,0,12,36. For Windows (XP), it’s at version 10,0,12,37. It does not however, update the Flash plugins for your other browsers.
I also did some Javascript benchmarks using the SunSpider Javascript benchmark, to see if perhaps AIR 1.5 includes the new Squirrelfish rendering engine for WebKit.
All tests were done on Mac OS X 10.5.5 (the smaller number the better, of course):
Safari 3.2 (5525.26.12) — 6530.0 ms, result
FireFox 3.03 — 3211.6 ms, result
Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit — 2523.6 ms, result
According to my results, Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit’s Javascript is approximately 2.59x faster than Safari 3.2, and approximately 1.27x faster than Firefox 3.03. So is it Squirrelfish? Likely. Extreme? Maybe.
According to the Surfin Safari Blog (for WebKit), Squirrelfish Extreme in the nightly builds is about 3.38x faster than Safari 3.1. But since I have Safari 3.2, I guess that’s close enough? It can’t be Squirrelfish (plain) because Squirrelfish non-extreme is only 1.59x as fast as WebKit 3.1. But then it can be just general Javascript improvements as detailed in a blog post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball, so who knows?!
Here’s the user-agent for Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit (Mac):
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21
All the version numbers in the AIR 1.5 user-agent are older than Safari 3.2 (Mac) though, which is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.26.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2 Safari/525.26.12
So the evidence is inconclusive for Squirrelfish. Still no SVG support in Adobe AIR 1.5 WebKit though, no surprise there 
(UPDATE): According to this new Adobe blog post, Adobe AIR 1.5 includes Squirrelfish, but does not mention the Extreme variant.
Technorati Tags: Adobe AIR 1.5, changes, squirrelfish
November 16th, 2008 in
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