Adobe AIR 1.5 released, what changed?

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

Quicktime on Safari – Question Mark

Ok, I don’t know what it is with my OS X install lately after installing OS update 10.5.4 but things seem to be broken left and right. Besides the trash issue in a previous post, Quicktime movies will not play in Safari – but they do play in Firefox. I updated to the latest Quicktime (7.5) and still no go after a restart. After trawling through numerous support forums, this is what worked for me:

1. Navigate to the “/Library/Internet Plug-Ins” folder
2. Delete the “QuickTime Plugin.webplugin” file
3. Restart Safari

Go to http://www.apple.com/trailers to test.

Technorati Tags: quicktime question mark, safari

Mac OS X – Files won’t go in the Trash

Most likely your Trash folder is not owned by you anymore. To fix:

1. Open Terminal.app, and type in the next 3 commands:
2. sudo chown <your_user_name>:staff ~/.Trash
3. sudo chmod 700 ~/.Trash
4. killall Finder

Stressful blogging

The New York Times has an article about prominent bloggers being stressed out. Hey, just like a “real” job (not that theirs is not real of course). In their pay-per-click world, I don’t know if it will ever get less stressful. Just like any other business. I’m sure if they quit, some other blogger will fill the void.

Technorati Tags: blogging

VNC to OS X Leopard from Windows

Here are the steps:

1. Download RealVNC
2. Launch it
3. Select the “Options…” button
4. Select the “Full Colour (all available colours)” radio button in the “Colour and Encoding” tab

Selecting any other colour level will make RealVNC close abruptly after connection.

Technorati Tags: vnc, leopard, os x, xp, vista, windows