November 9, 2010
When Apple released their new MacBook Air last month, the industry was surprised (but not too surprised) to see that they didn’t ship with Adobe Flash Player pre-installed. Macs, along with nearly every other PC, had shipped standard with Flash pre-installed for well over a decade. Apple has been at odds with Adobe (specifically regarding Flash) lately, so while it was a significant move, it wasn’t completely unwarranted.
Once the Airs were out in the wild, a few tech bloggers and reviewers decided to test how performance changed after they installed Flash. The results were pretty shocking: amongst other things, the battery life dropped by as much as 2 hours once Flash was installed and used regularly. Two hours!
The technical details of why or how that happens are beyond the scope of this post. But those details weren’t specific to the MacBook Air. Meaning that theoretically, any Mac would have a better battery life without Flash installed. The only reason that this was suddenly discovered with the MacBook Airs was because Flash is quite a bit easier to install than to efficiently uninstall, so having a laptop that shipped as a clean slate made doing those benchmarks much easier.
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Posted in Websinal | Adobe | Apple | Flash | HTML5 | iPad | iPhone | Web Development
November 4, 2010
As I recently mentioned, I’m working through moving from one phase of my great Chicago Adventure to another. The Genesis of this transition was a couple of weekends ago, when a friend was in town and invited me to a house concert in Pilsen. “Sounds great!” I said. “See you there.” I’d never even heard of Pilsen.
Pilsen, it turns out, is a large neighborhood southwest of downtown. So I jumped on the L and headed further out from home than I’d yet gone. The apartment where I was ultimately headed was a 15 minute walk from the station, so after getting off the train, I found myself strolling down a street unlike any I’d yet seen in Chicago.
After just a brief glance, its obvious that Pilsen is a predominantly hispanic neighborhood. The restaurants, shops and storefronts were all lined with Dia de los Muertos decorations, the sides of buildings were beautifully painted in huge, distinctly urban-hispanic murals, and the sweet scent of Mexican bakeries filled the evening air as I passed block after block dotted with art galleries and handmade craft shops. From the brief experience I had, it was a lovely, charming neighborhood.
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Posted in Personal | Balance | Chicago | Chipotle | Dallas | Kickstand | Life | Pilsen | Transition | Yelp
