Apple Hardware High Performance
Apple’s launch of the iPad didn’t really rock my world. But, within the iPad presentation, there was a little something that got my spine tingling: Apple revealed that the iPad is powered by a heretofore unknown CPU — the A4.
To me this is much bigger news than the iPad itself. This is an Apple-developed CPU, which I think is a first for the company. Apple describe the A4 as a “1GHz custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip.” Early hands-on reports of the iPad seem to support this. One thing that is now well documented is that the iPad is very fast. Apple also claim run times of up to 10 hours and a standby time of up to 1 month for the iPad, so it’s clear that the A4 is very power-efficient.
So what do we know or can reasonably assume about the A4?
We know it runs at 1GHz which, in the case of the iPad, results in a respectable performance. We know that, as a “system on a chip,” it contains both a CPU (initial suspect is an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore) and a GPU (possibly a PowerVR SGX series 5). So it’s multi-core capable and has a high-performance FPU. It’s also OpenGL capable.
It’s probably reasonable to anticipate that this chip, or its derivatives, will pop up in future iPods, iPhones and perhaps the Apple TV — along with any further mobile devices that Apple conceives — as well as the iPad and its future revisions.
I don’t think that the processor, at least in this form, will appear in Apple’s desktops or laptops — and it’s not needed there either.
What’s really exciting about the A4 is that it’s a first attempt — yet it competes very favourably with the established mobile CPUs from the likes of Qualcomm, et al.
I’ll bet the launch of the iPad has caused concern in the boardrooms of quite a few companies. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.
Apple Art Audio Gaming Hardware Internet Music Silver Screen Video Web Browser
Apple have finally unveiled a tablet computer, the iPad. The anticipation leading up to this launch and the speculation surrounding it has been truly staggering. Yet I find myself strangely underwhelmed by the device.
Apple Hardware Macintosh MessagePad Newton Vintage Web Design
When a web-site has been running since 19961 you would expect it to have enjoyed some evolution, with the odd redesign thrown in along the way. The web-site at apple.com is one such site. Flickr user Kernel Panic maintains a gallery of screen captures of Apple’s home page and it represents an interesting journey through the history of the company. It’s amazing to me that the basic design of apple.com as it stands today is the same as it was in 1998 — how’s that for consistency?
But what would Apple’s home page have looked like in the years prior to 1996? Sadly we never got to see an apple.com home page for the launch of the Apple I, Apple II, Lisa, Macintosh or MessagePad… until today! Dave Lawrence of Newton Poetry fame posted a couple of mock-up apple.com home pages for the Lisa and MessagePad machines on his weblog and Matt Pearce answered Lawrence’s call for others to add to the meme. Between them, they’ve come up with a few beautifully crafted and clever images of the home pages that might have been.
Continue Reading…
Apple GUI Interface Macintosh OS X Software
Everyone’s favourite uninstaller for OS X, AppZapper, recently generated a bit of a buzz as it metamorphosed into version 2 and acquired a slick new interface. AppZapper also seems to have grown beyond being a simple uninstaller, several pundits are now describing it as an “application manager.”
As an application manager one can view one’s applications in a pretty interface, sort them with various filters and even store their license codes within AppZapper. I have to say that license code management seems to me to be an odd addition to an uninstaller. There’s no synergy between the tasks of uninstalling applications that are no longer required and retrieving licensing details for those that are.
But that’s not my biggest issue with AppZapper. To me, whilst the application itself is extremely useful, the interface is completely redundant and, pretty as it is, it shouldn’t be there at all.
History Politics Silver Screen
I don’t often write about movies on the Urban Mainframe. That’s odd in itself because I watch a lot of them and consider myself to be something of a movie buff. Having said that, my movie collection, I suspect, is that of a typical bloke. There’s lots of war, action, sci-fi and adventure films. There’s not a lot of drama. There’s only one or two “chick flicks” (oh come on, who doesn’t love Ghost?)
My collection is that of someone who doesn’t demand too much, intellectually, from his entertainment. I watch films to escape for an hour and a half — to be James Bond, Neo or Luke Skywalker. I don’t want to have to think too much when I watch a movie, I just want my imagination stimulated and the day-to-day tedium of life to be replaced with beautiful women, fast cars and lots and lots of explosions and gunfire.
You can probably appreciate then that, on being given for Christmas a sub-titled film with a dialogue spoken entirely in German, I wasn’t exactly filled with delight and anticipation. However, and to my great surprise, The Lives of Others turned out to be one of those rarest of films — one that captures the viewer’s attention from the moment it starts and holds it in a vice-like grip until the final credits roll.
Design Photoshop Programming Web Design
In an article on the web-design advent calendar, 24 Ways, Meagan Fisher advocates setting aside Photoshop and building design comps directly in our preferred flavour of HTML.
That’s how I always work anyway. Only once have I ever built a design in Photoshop before writing the code and that was for the front page of this website — it took ages and felt totally un-natural and counter-intuitive to me. I did it because I understood that that’s how all designers work. I wanted to try it out to see if it made the process any easier for me, it didn’t, at all.
Even so, I think Meagan has overlooked a quite important point: not all web-designers are writers of code.
Desktop Wallpaper DWotW Graphics Imaging Photoshop
Desktop Wallpaper of the Week: I love this image. It was created by “h16” and is posted on deviantART. The monochrome to vivid-colour transition between the two girls is extremely well done and the hand-painted effect is simply gorgeous. I can’t decide if the girl on the right is holding a “fantasy” lover, or the ghost of a dead friend or relative perhaps? One of the comments on the deviantArt site suggested that this image represents good meeting evil — but I’m not convinced — there seems to be me to be too much passion between the two girls for this to be a meeting of such polar opposites.
Either way, it’s a gorgeous piece of art and makes a fantastic desktop wallpaper.
You can download the full-size wallpaper from the deviantART website. You should also check out the rest of h16’s work.
Desktop Wallpaper DWotW Photography Urban
Desktop Wallpaper of the Week: This cool HDR photo of a Mini in an underground parking garage makes a great desktop wallpaper. The vibrant red car really stands out in this grungy urban setting and the camera tilt adds a dynamism that would otherwise be missing. I love how the photographer has positioned the car behind the arrow — suggesting that she’s poised and ready to surge forward.
This photograph, taken by Travel Man, is available in a variety of resolutions on Flickr.
Design Silver Screen Typography
I’ve just found out that I’ve won this great poster from Travis Neilson. How cool is that? I’m thrilled.
Apache Changelog High Performance Linux Open Source PHP Scalability Software Web Server Weblog WordPress
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… oh sorry, wrong script. I’ll start over. In the dim and distant past, I wrote about my efforts to eke a little bit more performance out of the WordPress installation that this glorious website runs upon. What I’d done was fairly basic: content compression, reduced page weights, database tuning… the usual stuff.
I also described how I’d failed to get WP Super Cache working and wrote that I was investigating PHP accelerators. Yet, despite my endeavours, the website’s performance continued to be, well, pitiful. Some time later I managed to get WP Super Cache working and things improved, but were still disappointing to me.
I come from a mod_perl background and one of mod_perl’s strengths is the speed at which it can run its applications. The PHP app’s that I now find myself working with just can’t compete. I believed that I’d just have to accept that the performance goals I was aiming for weren’t achievable.
However, I was recently forced to reconsider my position when I was contracted to build a website on top of the Zend Framework — because, despite being written entirely in PHP, nursesstore.co.uk turned out to be very fast.
Suddenly, I knew that it was possible to build fast PHP applications. So I turned my attention, once again, to the speed-deficient Urban Mainframe with the fire of the true zealot burning in my eyes.