It a Gala and You’re Invited
This past week was a crazy week for me at work, but I did get a chance to play with one new technology. Gala, the Flash 10.1 beta from Adobe that has hardware accelerated video playback. Flash has been the bane of my Mac experience and it has really led me to believe Jobs & Co have made the right choice excluding it from iPhone OS. I disagree to the extent, but that is another story. Gala is starting to change my mind.
For the first time Flash video no longer pegs my CPU to 100%. This is a major piece of awesome. I can now have a flash video playing while also working in InDesign, Photoshop and Aperture. I think this increased performance has also helped Flash itself to crash less. I loose more browser windows to Flash than anything else. All I have to say is thank goodness for Chrome. Since installing Gala however, I haven't had a crash because of Flash. Maybe it was just a good week, but overal it seems to be a major improvement.
If you run a Mac, I would have to say that this is going to be a major improvement for you. A couple small caveats at the moment however. First, it is a beta application at the moment, so use at your own risk. While in beta, there will be a small white box in the upper left corner whenever hardware acceleration is taking place. This is to test what videos can take advantage of the acceleration. In my testing everything on Hulu and Vimeo showed the box, and most things on youtube did as well. Some of the older videos on youtube did not, but that was to be expected. For the first time in a long time I am looking forward to a new release of the flash player for Mac.