dispatchEvent » Mac OS X

Leopard 10.5 supports 512 pixel icons

Mims Wright — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:22:37 +0000

While playing around with Icon Composer in the newest version of XCode Tools for I noticed that Leopard now supports 512×512 pixel icons - much larger than the older 128×128 pixel icons. I assume this has to do with the Cover Flow view for the Finder which displays icons much larger than the other views. Sure enough, Apple have redesigned all their icons for the new format and they look gorgeous. I took some screen grabs of my favourites. Click the thumbnails to see the details. Notice the small text in the iTunes and Dictionary icons and the textures on the truck and the guitar. Hawt!

Click for full size

Dictionary

Garage Band

iTunes

TextEdit

Transmit

Really, really small Flex files

Mims Wright — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:02:29 +0000

I am not even going to mention that Flex 3 public beta is out because you already know.

What you may have been too excited to notice though is that Flex 3 will now cache the Flex framework for users meaning that Flex applications don’t have to save all of that stuff in the SWF file making them very small (like 50KB). Think about that! This is huge news and I predict it will be the final stroke that wins many Flex skeptics over to the platform. Not only that, but you’ll be able to include your own custom runtime shared libraries (also cached) so you can create functionality that’s shared between several applications.

Ted Patrick, in his evangelical way, describes this feature with handy diagrams on his blog.

There is also an introduction to new features on Adobe Labs so you can gush over videos and samples of all the new features.

On a side note, it looks like Leopard, the new version of OS X, will provide significant improvements for quickly accessing your porn.

Aliased Text in Eclipse on OS X

Roger Braunstein — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:02:53 +0000

Maybe I’m just a crotchety, old-school, Jolt-drinking, amber-on-black, command-line code junkie, but for the last 2 years I’ve been so frustrated that I just can’t get my code font in Eclipse / Flex Builder on Mac OS X to be aliased! Those little smooth edges on my fixed-width bitmap fonts drove me to irrational madness. Well, I had given up and moved to PC, but I’ve had Mac laptops throughout, and I finally took some time to solve this little pet peeve. If you share my frustration, read on.

Arrrgh!

Ahhhh…

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