Unibody 17″ MacBook Pro Battery

By Erik | Published: July 21, 2009

I love my new 17″ MBP, but claiming that you can get 7 hours out of a charge while using the 9600M graphics is just a bit of a stretch. Unless, of course, that estimated battery life in the menu bar is way off. I’ll be lucky to get 5.5 hours and all I’ve been doing is light chatting on iChat, listening to music on low volume, and now I’m writing this blog post. I should also point out that, since it’s night time and I’m sitting in bed, my screen is on the lowest brightness setting. I’ve got say that I’m kinda bummed about this :-/ It’s still good, no doubt, but I was expecting more based on some of the reviews I’d been reading about this machine’s amazing battery life. Oh well… I’ve give it a real test one of these days to confirm 5 to 5.5 hours is more like it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Max OS X Dashboard Widget font all wrong

By Erik | Published: July 16, 2009

I recently (as in, yesterday) moved over from an iMac to a MacBook Pro. OS X is generally pretty good about moving all of your files and settings over for you. But there are some hiccups in the process and one that I just found has to do with the font used on the Dashboard Widgets. Earlier today I hit F12 to bring up the dashboard and some of the widgets looked wrong wrong wrong. See for yourself:

widgets gone wild

The problem is simple: There is a conflict with the Helvetica Neue font. That’s the font that comes with OS X that’s used all over the system, including the built in widgets. I had added a 3rd party of the font to use on a client’s project about a year ago and those font names conflict. For some reason, in moving to the MacBook Pro, OS X decided that it would use the 3rd party version rather than the built in version. This is great for the client’s project, not good for the look of the OS.

Turns out that the solution was simple, too, thankfully. I simply had to deactivate all of the 3rd party Helvetica Neue faces in Font Book. Actually, first I had to enable them all in Font Book, and then I could immediately disable them again. That solved the problem. I don’t think you need to reboot or anything. Just deactivate them and then bring up the Dashboard again. Everything should look good after that. If that doesn’t work, I’m not sure what to tell you. If you find a better solution, please post it in the comments below :)

lots of neue

Now going the opposite direction, that is, using the 3rd party version instead of the built in version, is another story. I think they explain how to do that here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6365831

Good luck!

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

FLV bitrate capped?

By Erik | Published: July 8, 2009

I’ve got this beautiful QuickTime movie I need to convert to an FLV so that I can embed it into the Flash timeline. The source movie is, like I said, beautiful. 500x500px, 2 seconds long, and a whopping 15.5MB. With a file size like that, you’d expect it to look good. Also, for what it’s worth, the clip has an alpha channel baked into it and was created in some sort of 3D program (Maya or 3DS Max, I think).

Problem is, the FLVs that Adobe Media Encoder is turning out look pretty much like crap.

So I thought I’d turn up the export settings “to eleven” across the board to increase the quality of the FLV it gives me. But it doesn’t work. In fact, once I get to a certain point, the file size (and quality) seems to be capped. Even with all of the settings turned up as high as possible, the biggest FLV I get is a puny 772KB. And, the weird thing is, even if I turn down the settings (to 5 across the board, for example), I still get the same 772KB FLV. As you’d expect, going from 15.5MB to 772KB leads to some substantial loss in quality.

What the hell is going on? What’s with this cap on quality? It seems pretty clear that the FLV encoder is saying “this quality is good enough for you and I refuse to make anything better.” Grrr… This would be fine if I didn’t need to encode the alpha channel and embed the FLV directly onto the timeline. But I do. And I seem to be stuck with these fairly low-quality FLVs.

Unless there is another method to get this sequence of frames from the QuickTime movie embedded into the Flash timeline. I guess I’ll look into that next.

–

A-ha! QuickTime Pro will let me export a clip as an image sequence. Perfect! And this actually solves another weird issue I was having (that I won’t get into here). But it does add a new problem: each PNG that’s part of the image sequence seems to be of a different gamma setting than the source QuickTime clip. So either there’s a setting I need to adjust when exporting or I’m going to have to batch process these PNGs in Photoshop.

–

So, the trick to fix the color issue is to open the files in PS and then Save for Web. That removes the color profile info that QT attaches to each PNG. I’m good to go now.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Error #2121 when loading external SWF

By Erik | Published: July 5, 2009

I’m running into an issue that goes a little something like this:

  • I have an external SWF that I’m loading into another parent SWF
  • The external SWF is simply a still image I created from a PNG using Fireworks CS3
  • I package up the parent SWF and external SWF and send it to another computer
  • When loading the external SWF with a Loader, I get the following message when trying to access the loader.contentLoaderInfo.content property within the Loader’s Event.INIT listener:

SecurityError: Error #2121: Security sandbox violation: LoaderInfo.content: file:///Users/erikhansen/Desktop/SWF Loader Test/swf_loader.swf cannot access file:///Users/erikhansen/Desktop/SWF Loader Test/from_fireworks.swf. This may be worked around by calling Security.allowDomain.

Some more info that I know:

  • This works just fine when posted to a web server
  • This will also work without throwing an error if I create the external SWF with Flash (which will just make the whole process of making SWFs from PNGs even a bigger pain in the ass than it already is)
  • If I want, I could just add the Loader directly to the stage, but there are times that I need access to the loader.contentLoaderInfo.content property

So I’m trying to figure out a way around this problem. It usually isn’t a problem at all since, like I said, it works fine when being loaded from a web server. But it is a problem when I send a project to a client and they can’t view it on their computer. Hmm…

No solution yet. Maybe you know something I don’t.

Posted in ActionScript, Flash | Leave a comment

No standard for HTML 5 audio and video tags

By Erik | Published: July 1, 2009

Will HTML 5 ever kill Flash, even for something as simple as video and audio playback? As long as there is more than one browser out there, no. Further proof.

Posted in Flash | Leave a comment

OCZ Vertex SSD

By Erik | Published: June 2, 2009

I’m pretty excited that solid state drives are finally living up their promises. A good review of the new OCZ Vertex SSD at BareFeats.com.

Hopefully by the time I get a 17″ MBP, there will be a 512GB option.

…drool…

Posted in General Geekery | Leave a comment

101transitions.com

By Erik | Published: May 27, 2009

I just set up a new site: 101transitions.com

Nothing there yet, but it will be a place for me to put Flash experiments. Those experiments will mainly be ActionScript 3 slideshow transitions and rollover effects that I often dream up and would like to share. That’s the plan at this moment, at least.

And, yes, this is at least mildly inspired by Keith Peter’s old bit-101.com site, which, as far as I know, was Keith making a different ActionScript project every day (at least originally)*. So, credit where credit is due. Also, speaking of Keith, get “ActionScript 3 Animation.” It’s good stuff.

*No promise that I’m going to make an entry every day. In fact, no promise I’ll even have 101 of these things!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Visual effects weirdness in Mac OS X

By Erik | Published: May 18, 2009

I almost made a post today about some issues I was having with my iMac. I had just noticed that the visual effects/graphics on my last gen top of the line iMac was performing under my expectations. Now, this isn’t a new machine. I’ve had it since October. But recently I noticed that certain things weren’t looking as smooth as I expected or as smooth as they used to look. Two examples:

  • Two specific Quicksilver panel animations were running a bit roughly. When you actually tell QS to do something, such as open an app, open a file, open a web page, email someone, etc., the panel zooms towards you as it fades out. It’s a quick transition, but I noticed that it was clearly “dropping frames” and didn’t look as smooth as I remembered it. Odd. The second QS quirk was when you cancel out of the QS panel by hitting the ESC key. When you do that, the panel squashes down vertically and stretches out horizontally as it fades out. That, too, was being rendered roughly. And as soon as the panel had drawn out, I saw, for a split second, a phantom remnant of the panel, in the size and position that it was right before you cancelled out of it. I wasn’t able to capture it with Snapz Pro or Screenflow, but it was there. Trust me!

  • In Tweetie for Mac, when you are looking at a particular user’s list of tweets, you can click on their photo in the upper left of the window to see a larger version of their picture. It shows this with a really nice animation and as you close the image, it also animates away nicely, too. This animation was playing back a little jagged, just like the Quicksilver animations. Huh… And, oddly, as you closed the user’s picture, the phantom image thing happened just like it does in Quicksilver. That is, as soon as the genie effect that draws out the image completes, you see, just for a split second, the full sized image where it was just before you told it to go away. Okay, very weird, and this is clearly not a software issue. Something else is going on.

I switched over to my older white MacBook to test things out there. This MacBook is a 2ghz machine (vs. the 3ghz iMac) and has much, MUCH weaker graphics (GMA X3100 integrated graphics in the MacBook vs. NVIDIA 8800 GS in the iMac). But everything looked great on the older, slower MacBook. WTF?!

I figured there was a problem with the 10.5.7 update I had just applied to the iMac, since the MacBook was still at 10.5.6. But, after updating the MacBook to 10.5.7, the problems remained. Once again, WTF?!

I downloaded and ran Xbench on both machines to make sure the graphics in the iMac were running properly. Sure enough, across the board the iMac wiped the floor with the MacBook, usually scoring close to twice as high as the MacBook, as I would expect. For the record, the OpenGL result for the iMac was way, way, WAY ahead of the MacBook. Graphics seemed to be fine.

That’s when I tried out the Quicksilver visual effects again. And, everything was fine. It ran smoothly. No issues at all. What?! I tried the effects in Tweetie. Same deal. All good now. Um… I don’t get it. Was the graphics card in the iMac just taking a nap? Did it need that Xbench workout to kick it in the ass to get it moving? Seriously, I have no idea what just happened. But my iMac is running great again. I’m about to reboot the iMac to see if it’s sluggish again after shutting down. Hopefully that’s not the case…

-

After reboot, I’m happy(?) to report that everything is back to normal. The issue seems to be resolved. The mystery is very much not resolved, though. But, if you are having problems like this, you might want to grab a copy of Xbench and run it. It might be the kick in the pants your system needs.

Posted in Mac | Leave a comment

Screencast: 4 Issues with Flash CS4 (that the update didn’t fix)

By Erik | Published: May 17, 2009

Check out the screencast I just posted on Vimeo. It’s a follow up to the tweet I made a few days ago. Keep in mind that the screencast is in HD (1280×720) so if you hit the Full Screen button on the Vimeo player, you’ll see a lot more detail. Next up: I need to figure out how to embed that video directly into my blog in a professional-looking manner!

Posted in Flash | Leave a comment

Hide the Flash CS4 pixel grid

By Erik | Published: May 15, 2009

You know how when you zoom in far enough in Flash CS4 that tiny “pixel grid” shows up? It’s a nice feature, but I don’t always want to see it. Turns out getting it to go away is as simple as deselecting: View > Snapping > Snap to Pixels

It took me more than 30 seconds to figure it out so I thought I’d share.

Posted in Flash | Leave a comment

  • Categories