Adobe just can’t get a break with Flash on the Mac. Before you get too excited about the Flash Gala plugin, you might want to look at these performance results from Engadget. The new MacBook Pro with a Core i7 processor performed quite well with the beta Gala plugin, with CPU utilization going down anywhere from 30%-50%, but it’s brother with a Core i5 processor performed significantly worse than using the Flash player without hardware decoding, with processor utilization going up 20%.

What gives? Well, it’s basically beta software and Apple just recently opened access to the hardware, so there’s obviously a lot of room for optimization to be had. For the time being though, if you like running dodgy development builds and have a Mac with a GeForce 9400M, 320M, or 330M GPU, you can check out the beta plugin at Adobe Labs. Personally, we’d wait a while.

I don’t know about anyone else but I’d love to know Steve Jobs thoughts on this particular benchmark since he is such a fan of Flash, just for comic value alone.

Well, Steam for Mac was supposed to be available in April, but with the month nearly over they missed that release target and have now set an official release date of May 12. According to JoyStiq, Steam sent them the following short message:

“Valve today announced the public release of Steam for the Mac is May 12. Please stay tuned for more information.”

That’s it then, two weeks from now Mac users will finally have Steam. A two week delay isn’t too bad right? Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into two months.

If you have any interest in playing Team Fortress 2, CounterStrike, and the other Steam games, be sure to check out the system requirements for Steam in Mac OS X. Basically, you’ll want a newer Mac (think 2008 and newer) to run it well.

You can make a nice screensaver out of your own images within Mac OS X very easily, here’s the basics:

* Create a new folder, let’s call it ‘My ScreenSaver’
* Gather images from your photo albums and drop them into ‘My Screensaver’ folder
* Launch System Preferences
* Click on Desktop & Screensaver
* Click the Screensaver tab
* Select the + button near the bottom of the screensaver list
* Select “Add Folder of Pictures”
* Navigate to the “My ScreenSaver” pictures folder you created earlier
* That’s it!

You can now select various effects for the screensaver by clicking the tiled icons and Options, to determine how the images are displayed, if they’re faded in and out, cropped, etc.

This process of making your own screensaver is even easier if you use iPhoto, because iPhoto automatically hooks up to the ScreenSaver preference pane, you simply select the iPhoto album you want displayed and the rest is the same.

Gas Mask is a simple hosts file manager that sits in your menubar and allows you to easily edit and switch between multiple hosts files. With support for syntax highlighting, Growl, and hotkey hosts switching, it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to deal with multiple hosts files on a Mac. Gas Mask is a freely available download,open source and donationware

Gas Mask developer home
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If you ever wanted to know exactly what Steve Jobs thinks about Flash, you’ve got your chance. Apple’s CEO has released a lengthy letter detailing why Apple does not allow Flash on it’s iPhone, iPod, and iPad devices. Calling Flash part of the “past” and “PC era”, he addresses six major points as to why Apple is leaving Flash behind, they are:

* openness of the platforms
* the ‘full web’ and video experience
* reliability, security, and battery performance
* battery life of devices
* touch user-input
* the pain of third-party developer tools

The entire 1671 word essay in it’s entirety is repeated below:
Read more »

ShrinkIt is a handy little app that greatly reduces the file size of Illustrator generated PDF’s. Created as an internal tool, the developers over at Panic realized that PDF files saved from Adobe Illustrator were loaded with loads of extra nonsense metadata, even patterns, preview bitmaps, swatches, creating enormous PDF file sizes when they should be much smaller. The solution? Process the Adobe bloatfile through Apple’s PDF processor. You can do this yourself through Preview, but it’s a pain to open and re-save tons of PDF files, thus the creation of ShrinkIt. Now you can drag and drop your Illustrator PDF’s into ShrinkIt and you’ll save a whole lot of space (the original file is always kept, just renamed).

ShrinkIt is for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard only.

ShrinkIt developer home
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Blizzard has just announced via Twitter that the official StarCraft 2 Beta client for Mac is now available. At the moment, the beta is only available for testing on North American servers but that is expected to expand soon.

Many game stores are offering free StarCraft 2 Beta keys with the pre-order of StarCraft 2, including GameStop.com and Amazon.com. Both Amazon and GameStop will email you the beta key within 5 days of your pre-order purchase.

Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference is set for June 7-11 this year, and many desktop Mac developers are shaking their heads wondering where the love is. The tagline for this years WWDC conference is “The center of the app universe” and Apple’s Design Awards are curiously lacking a Mac OS X category, instead favoring iPhone and iPad apps from the App Store. The Mac development community was quick to notice this and have been voicing their opinions, as TUAW gathers a few poignant quotes from frustrated developers:

“Eliminating the Apple Design Awards for desktop applications in 2010 is premature and an insult to the thousands of programmers who devote their days to making the Mac desktop a fun and productive environment.” – Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch

“…the lack of a Mac ADA when there is still great Mac software being made is a bit of a slap in the face. Whether it’s intentional or not, Apple is saying that the Mac is not an important platform compared to the iPhone and iPad.” – Justin Williams of Second Gear Software

Perhaps there is a lack of Mac attention because Mac OS X 10.7 has been delayed due to Apple’s focus on iPhone OS? Maybe there is some truth to the rumors of a desktop Mac App Store? Or is Apple planning a major announcement regarding the future of Mac OS at WWDC? With no clear answers, the Mac community is left to speculate. Whatever the reasons, many loyal Mac users and developers remain disappointed as this years event takes a clear turn away from the Mac desktop and into the mobile world.

Gaming on the Mac is about to get a pretty big boost with Steam for Mac OS X due just around the corner in May. Here’s what we know about the system requirements for the Mac Steam client:

* Intel processor support only
* Mac OS X 10.5 or greater, some games require 10.5.8 or 10.6.3 or higher
* X3100 and 950 integrated Intel Graphics chipsets are not supported (older MacBook models)
* Steam and Source both run native in Mac OS X with OpenGL

Games that are confirmed for the Mac version include: Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, The Half-Life Series, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal, and Portal 2. Mac users who already purchased the games for a PC will be able to use the same key and won’t have to buy the game again for the Mac version, and as expected you’ll be playing against all the PC users out there.

Ping is an essential utility for network administrators, but it’s also pretty handy to check if websites are online, your internet connection is working, or if a network resource is available. Here’s how to use it the ping utility in Mac OS X:

* Launch the Terminal
* Type the following command: ping google.com
* This will ping to google.com repeatedly until you stop the ping command from running with Control+C
* You can send a specific number of packets to an address by using the -c flag:
ping -c 5 192.168.0.1

The ping command only works if the server you are pinging responds to ping requests (most do if they’re online, except perhaps the most hardened networks).

I use ping constantly to make sure network servers are available, it’s a lot faster to ping an IP than to try and connect to it through any number of protocols.