MacRumors.com

Adobe released Flash Player 10 beta 2 via its Adobe Labs website this week. According to one of its developers, the new mac version promises to bring up to 3 times the performance for certain operations.

If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster.

In a separate posting written before the release, he points out one text animation that achieved 8.5 frames per second (fps) before the optimization and then 28 fps afterwards in Safari.

Lastly I want to mention that the Flash Player is optimized for both x86 and PPC. It always has been. But these kind of benchmarks are really useful for us to identify platform specific bottlenecks like in this case.

There is no firm timeline for Flash Player 10's release, however the developer indicates that development is beginning to wrap up. Flash Player 10 will add a host of new features including some GPU-based processing (similar to Core Image).

Apple has quietly dropped the price of the high end MacBook Air by $500.

The high end MacBook Air comes equipped with a 1.8GHz upgrade (from 1.6GHz) and a 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD). The total price for the high end laptop is $2598. Compare this to the original price of the 1.8GHz/SSD MacBook Air at $3098 just last week (Google Cache).

The base price for the 1.6GHz 80GB Hard Drive MacBook Air remains at $1799. The difference in price appears to be a combination of price drops in both the processor upgrade ($200 vs $300) and SSD ($599 vs $999).

Apple has emailed customers who have outstanding orders that are affected by the price drop:

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Apple has announced a price drop for a component(s) of the MacBook Air that you recently ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new lower price.

For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status website at . After your order is shipped, you can also obtain tracking information on this site.

Thank you for your shopping at the Apple Store.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Support

Meckimac.com posts a photo of the MobileMe retail box that has started shipping to some customers.

The box itself is not particularly useful as it likely just contains an activation code for a year of MobileMe service. Apple's .Mac service was similarly distributed as a box with an activation code. The MobileMe web service is not yet active, but should appear at Me.com.

Apple has given additional hints that the MobileMe service should come online imminently. They have recommended all current .Mac owners to sync their bookmarks back to their Macs by July 6th. While MobileMe will allow bookmark syncing between computers, it will remove the online web access to them. In order to preserve your bookmarks, you need to make sure they are synced to your Mac.

NVIDIA reported that there is a problem with some older graphics chips that shipped in a "significant quantities" of laptop PCs. NVIDIA has provided no details as to which laptop models are affected, but plans to release a software driver in the near future to help address it.

To tackle the problem, the company is releasing a software driver that will cause system fans to start operating sooner and reduce the "thermal stress" on the chips. The driver has been provided to laptop makers directly, said Derek Perez, an Nvidia spokesman.

These products have reportedly been failing at "higher than normal rates" and the company expects to pay $150-$200 million in repair, return and replacement costs in Q2 due to this issue.

NVIDIA currently provides the graphics chipsets for the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, without any further details, it's unknown if any Apple notebooks are affected. If affected, we should expect a driver update from Apple.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office revealed at least a dozen new patent applications from Apple this morning. The majority of the applications revealed ongoing multi-touch research by Wayne Westerman, the former cofounder of Fingerworks.

We've seen many exciting multi-touch patent applications from Apple over the past few years including screenshots of a Mac OS X implemenation of advanced multi-touch gesturing.

Today's patent applications cover ongoing research in refining the touch experience by avoiding unintentional contact and advancing the hardware technology itself, but a few interesting tidbits were also found.

One patent application titled "Gesture Learning" describes methods to teach these advanced gestures to users. Many readers have been concerned that previously depicted gestures for advanced multi-touch applications may be too hard to learn. In order to combat this hurdle, Apple is researching the use of visible feedback such as animated motion trails and/or hand motions as well as interactive games to teach users these gestures.

Another interesting possibility raised is the use of both capacitance (finger tip) and resistance (fingernail) to provide secondary functionality in future touch screens. The iPhone introduced a multi-touch capacitance based screen that allowed it to recognize bare finger touches only. This means that the iPhone will not respond to fingernails, gloved fingers touches or a standard stylus.



Apple suggests the addition of pressure sensitivity to provide additional functionality. For example, touching an item in a list with your fingertip would select it, while pressing it with your fingernail (or otherwise shielded finger or stylus) could bring up a pop-up menu (see picture above). Another interesting possibility would be the ability to add text-selection and copy/paste functionality. In an email, for example, while swiping with your fingertip would scroll the screen, using your fingertip or stylus could invoke text selection.

Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for a future Apple device to take advantage of these features as the current iPhone is not capable of this functionality.

Mobile carrier Optus has announced iPhone 3G pricing and plans in Australia. Optus is offering both pre-paid and traditional post-paid plans.

The pre-paid price for the iPhone is $729 (8GB) and $849 (16GB) and allows you to sign up as needed without need for a long term contract. Pricing appears to start at $30 per "recharge" but without data service. 50MB is included in the $40 Turbo Cap pricing. Full details are available at Optus.

The post-paid pricing appears slightly more confusing (to this U.S. resident), with no upfront phone charge, but a monthly "handset repayment" which ranges from $0/month to $59/month depending on the plan and model of iPhone you get.

"Cap" plans start at $19/month with 100MB of internet data and "$50 of calls and text". Prices go up from there, with the highest price priced at $179/month with 1GB of data and "$1500 of calls and text". Full details are available at Optus.

Vodafone and Telstra are also providing iPhone service in Australia but have not yet announced their pricing plans.

Update: Telstra announced their plans today:

iPhone 3G will be available from Telstra on July 11 with a range of specially designed Next G iPhone 3G plans that meet the needs of any customer. The Next G iPhone 3G plans start at $30 per month with an upfront cost of $279 for the 8GB model and $399 for the 16GB model. Customers will receive the 8GB iPhone 3G model at no cost with the $80 plan and either the 8GB or the 16GB model at no cost with plans starting at $100 per month. All plans include free Wi-Fi access at Telstra hotspots and require a 24-month contract.

In typical Apple fashion, the iPhone SDK program and App Store application process has been clouded in some uncertainty about launch dates and details of the approval process. Today, Apple finally gave developers a firm deadline of July 7th as the last date they would be considered for inclusion on launch day of the App Store.

To ensure your application can be considered for the exciting launch of the App Store, submit your application by 12 PM PDT, on July 7, 2008. We will continue to accept applications after this time, however your application may not be available until after the launch of the App Store.

Of course, developers can continue to submit their applications beyond the deadline, but may not make the actual App Store launch. The App Store is expected to launch on July 11th, alongside the iPhone 3G.

The App Store is thought to be a huge opportunity amongst developers, and inclusion on the first day of launch would provide a significant amount of free publicity. Developers interested in additional MacRumors coverage on launch day and beyond should contact us.

Tom's Hardware publishes some interesting conclusions based on their testing of Solid State Drives (SSD) in laptops. They report that contrary to popular belief, SSD drives actually reduce the battery life in laptops as compared to traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDD). They try to explain this difference by theorizing that traditional hard drives rarely reach peak power consumption and are typically in a low power state. SSDs, however, are only "active or idle" without any additional power saving mechanisms.

Tom's Hardware seems confident in their results and compared four different Flash SSD drives to a traditional hard drive. The results either showed no change in battery life or up to one hour (14%) less battery life for the test system (Dell Latitude D630). Testing was performed using the MobileMark 2007 benchmark which specifically measures battery life performance under "real world" usage. Despite the worse battery times, the SSD drives did outperform the traditional hard drive by a significant margin.

The only Mac which currently ships with a Solid State Drive option is the MacBook Air. Battery benchmarks for the MacBook Air showed modest gains vs no gains depending on the reviewer. It has been widely expected that Solid State Drives will become more available as prices on Flash memory drops. Besides improvements in performance, SSDs are also believed to be less prone to data loss.

Net Applications has published their latest numbers on browser and operating system marketshare. The numbers indicate that the Mac's marketshare, as reflected by their sample population, has continued to increase to as high as 7.94% in June.

These marketshare numbers are always a bit suspect as they are measured based on aggregated web visitors alone:

We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics.

Still, the numbers have shown almost steady increases, reflecting the same trend seen in retail sales data.

In addition, Net Applications reveals that 73% of visitors use Internet Explorer, 19% use Firefox and only 6.3% use Safari. Safari's marketshare, however, has also been on the rise from the lowest recorded figure of 4.71% in August 2007.

The iPhone 3G will launch on July 11th in 20 countries worldwide. More details have been trickling in about launch times and pricing:

- According to Macworld.co.uk, the UK's O2 stores will open at 7am on July 11th to begin selling the iPhone 3G. O2 will be limiting sales to one per customer.
- AT&T announced yesterday that U.S. AT&T stores would be opening at 8am to launch Apple's latest phone.
- New Zealand is said to be kicking off their sales at 12:01am local time. This translates into 5am Pacific, 8am Eastern, and 1pm London time on July 10th.
- International rate plans have been released for the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Hong Kong.
- Photo of an iPhone 3G "in the wild" taken in Mexico City.

Apple has not yet announced the time they will be opening their retail stores on launch day, but they are holding a briefing with retail stores on July 6th about the process. MacRumors readers are continuing to organize local meetups for launch day.

Readers interested in even more iPhone news should follow the iPhone subsection on MacRumors which has recently covered additional details:

- Unsubsidized iPhone 3G Still Locked
- Starting New Service on Original iPhone? Prices Stay the Same.
- Teaser Video for Rolando: a Platform/Puzzler Game for iPhone
- iPhone 2.0 Offers 'Wi-Fi Only' Option for Flights