Track of the Week: Contemplate by Wale

Today’s track of the week is from Wale’s first studio album, Attention Deficit: Contemplate, featuring Rhianna. My favorite part of the song is Rihanna’s distorted hook and how it lays on top of a simple beat. I first heard of Wale from @airlai as a rapper coming out of the DC area via his mixtapes. Probably what’s most catching about his songs is the long verse format he raps in. I’d love to see a Kid Cudi + Wale track.

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Chrome OS Screenshots

I downloaded the VMWare image of Chrome OS (actually of Chromium OS) and gave it a whirl. It’s still super bare bones and the video drivers seem to be unaccelerated (framerates are really choppy). It’s exactly what it’s billed to be: a web browser. I’ll hold off on passing any judgment on Google’s endeavor at this point given that the whole thing feels like it’s about a week after it started working.

Screenshot of Chrome OS

Screenshot of Chrome OS

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Track of the Week: The Distance by Cake

I send a weekly email to a group of friends that is my pick for a “track of the week.” The list has been going on for just short of two years and and is basically me sending music that was interesting that particular week. It tends swing between house/electronica, hip-hop and rock. Going forward, I’m going to start posting the picks on my blog. I don’t think I’ll post the actual audio files, but will link to the YouTube video if one exists. As a fair warning, at best I’m a mediocre music critic and an awful music writer, so reader beware.

This week is an “oldie” from 1996, The Distance by Cake, off of Fashion Nugget. I heard the song on the radio and realized I didn’t own the album. A quick trip to Amazon MP3 fixed that problem. I love how focused the song is in its sound & lyrics, and the deadpan delivery of the vocals makes it iconic. I remember hearing this song all the time in high school.

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AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 Betas

Today we made available the betas for Flash Player 10.1 (on the desktop) and AIR 2. While there’s a ton of features in both runtimes, one of the things that’s coolest to me is the shared work that’s gone in to the core of the “Flash runtime”. Across both runtimes, apps will use less memory and consume fewer CPU cycles just by the nature of the work that’s gone in to the runtime.

Since the cores are the same between Flash Player and AIR both runtimes benefit from the shared work. All this matters even more as we bring the Flash Platform to mobile devices (esp memory and CPU). Plus, features like the global exception handler (something the community has wanted for years, as I understand it) get exposed in the browser and in the desktop.

On the features side, I’m most excited about the support in Flash Player for hardware decoding of H.264 videos on Windows. The demo that our CTO showed at MAX had Hulu HD running on a netbook sipping CPU. On the AIR side it’s a tossup between the new networking features and the new native process APIs. My coworker, Rob, has a full write up at Logged In in the Adobe Developer Connection, so head there to learn more.

Needless to say, congrats to the teams and send us your feedback!

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Slides from Flash Apps on iPhone Session at MAX

I’ve uploaded from the slides from my presentation at MAX, “Building Applications for iPhone using Flash Pro CS5”. The slides and the talk cover some of the new capabilities we’re bringing to Flash Pro CS5 to allow developers to create native iPhone applications using ActionScript 3.0.

The talk is archived in two places. First, if you want the full experience with slides, video, audio and queue points check out the MAX 2009 archive. The archive is fantastic. It’s free, not geo-locked, and comprehensive. It’s almost as good as being at MAX in person. Second, if you just want the slides and voice over you can see it at Adobe TV.

Buliding Applications for iPhoen with Flash Pro CS5

Buliding Applications for iPhone with Flash Pro CS5

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Moving to WordPress

I moved my blog and my website today over to WordPress. I have it running on my Win2k3 server, running in IIS with PHP and MySQL installed. I had written my own blog software in 2002, named TalkOut, that ran www.redyawning.com. From RedYawning, the RSS2 feed was syndicated over to www.adityabansod.net. I had started RedYawning to learn ASP.NET & C#. The site ran but I haven’t had any time to put in to it in the last two or three years. There were definitely bugs plus a set of newer blogging standards (like spam protection) that I would never have the time to keep up with, thus I decided to move over to WordPress.

So far, WordPress has been an awesome experience. I exported my entire old blog as an RSS feed, then imported it in to WordPress. Like that, my entire blogging history from January 2001 to today (719 posts) from my old blog were now in my WordPress instance. I installed a few plug ins and picked a theme, and it ready to go. Overall, a very good OOBE.

Hopefully now with a new blogging platform, one that’s more scalable and more integrated in to the rest of my online experience (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc), I’ll post a bit more. Looking through my blogging history, I was most active in early 2005. These days, I find myself using Twitter much more often.

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