November 2011 – Page 2 – Kev's Development Toolbox

November 9, 2011

Adobe announces intent to ditch mobile version of Flash

Given the recent fuss over mobile devices that do (Android) or don’t (iOS) support Flash, it seems an odd card to play for Adobe to announce that they’re no longer going to develop Flash player for mobile devices.

Personally, I don’t see this as a big deal. Sure it was nice to have the ability to play Flash video or some Flash-based games on my Android phone, but it certainly wasn’t ever a deciding factor that I have to have an Android phone because it supports Flash. In a way this is good move for the industry, since getting Flash off of a growing platform removes one more barrier from widespread adoption of HTML5. The interesting thing is whether this is just the first step for Adobe, and that ultimately they’re going to abandon Flash on the desktop too in the near future? As HTML5 adoption and usage increases, the relevancy of Flash will surely decrease. Maybe Adobe is coming to terms with this at this point, and this is just their first step to ramping down their overall support for Flash?

November 7, 2011

Android tablets a plenty. New Nook Color, Amazon Fire coming soon, and quad-cores on the way

There’s an amazing variety of Android tablets out there right now. Barnes and Noble are giving their press conference this morning on their new Nook Color, which they’re saying outdoes the coming soon Amazon Fire in terms of a media consumption device.

Things are about to start getting real interesting though with the new nVidia Tegra 3 chipset which is rocking quad cores. Given that the Tegra 2 is the current powerhouse for all the fastest Android devices, this one is going to be a rocket for sure. The latest eee Transformer Prime from Asus is expected to be the first tablet to be released with the new processor, and a benchmarking app has already showed up with records of benchmarked Transformer Prime running the new chip, and surprise surprise it’s multiple times faster than anything currently out there.

November 6, 2011

Invaluable tips for restoring a Mac OS X Time Machine backup to a new drive

I recently replaced my hard drive in my 2008 MacBook Pro. After following the excellent step-by-step instructions here, I booted up from my install DVD formatted my new drive, selected the option to restore from backup and was shocked to not see my new drive as an available target drive. I can’t find the post where I found this invaluable tip, but apparently it’s a known issue with the install DVD and the ‘restore from backup’ feature that if you’ve just formatted a new drive, you need to press ‘back’ all the way back to the language display screen before going forward again to get to the restore option. Now you new drive appears as a target drive for the restore. Bizarre. Ok, well it works.

The great thing about Time Machine on the Mac is that it’s effortless to restore your whole machine from a backup. This was the first time I’d tried it to a new hard drive but it worked without any issues. Well, almost…

Not thinking, I booted my machine for the restore from my original Leopard DVD but I had upgraded my machine to Snow Leopard some time back. Restore completed without an issue, rebooted, got a kernel panic! WTF! That’s the first time I’d seen that on my Mac. Quick bit of Googling later, rebooted from the Snow Leopard DVD, redid the restore and now all is ok.