MemoryUsage
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Get your notifications: experimental Mac app from Facebook
Mac-using Facebook fans are going to be happy to learn about Facebook's experimental Desktop Notifications app. Desktop Notifications sits in the menu bar, and pops up notifications (using Growl if you have it) when they occur. It also gives you quick access to your news feed, profile page, and quick ways to update your status or start a new Facebook email message. There are two things about Desktop Notifications that are compelling, yet have nothing to do with the app itself. The first is the fact that it's a native Mac application, rather than yet another Facebook client written on Adobe Air. The second is that it was actually developed by Facebook themselves [Update] Thanks to Raul and Nate for pointing out in the comments that the application is marked as "not developed by Facebook", though one of the developers listed works for Facebook. It's unclear at this point how serious this project is; it's clearly marked as experimental, which is clearly becoming the post-Gmail way of denoting that something is beta. In terms of raw functionality, Desktop Notifications is pretty barebones, since most of what it does is take you to a particular Facebook page. Personally I kind of like it that way. It's relatively light in terms of memory usage, and uses virtually no CPU cycles at all unless you are actively interacting with it, which is exactly what I want from a utility that is running all the time. My one beef is that the built-in hotkey that pops up a status update dialog box conflicts with another utility on my system, and there is no way to modify it. Since Desktop Notifications is still in the experimental stage, that's a pretty small complaint. [Update] Commenter Scott points out that there is a preference setting to change the hotkey. [via TechCrunch]
New PlayStation 3 SDK released - OS memory footprint lessened
Developer blog Innerbits has a great breakdown of the most recent PlayStation 3 Software Development Kit, version 1.60. They provide detailed information on some of the more technical aspects of the PS3's operating system from a developer's perspective. The site analyzed the memory cost of the different features of the SDK and detailed the major ones. Here are the most interesting bits: OS footprint reduced from 64MB in December to 52MB in the most recent release, roughly a 20% drop in resource cost. Friends list costs 25 MB (?!) + 8MB for startup Remote play for PS3 games possible - costs only 8 MB PS3 OS cost: 84MB | X360 OS cost: 32MB (ouch) Sony is clearly trying hard to optimize the OS, improving it every release and adding more functionality while reducing memory footprint. Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go. Every megabyte that the PlayStation 3 OS uses is one less megabyte of space that developers can use for better textures, quicker load times, and faster framerates. Sony is going to have a difficult time convincing studios to incorporate the different PSN features if the developers have to devote such a large amount of memory to them.According to Innerbits, the next SDK release should be late May or June. They anticipate gaining additional memory back, so hopefully in the future we'll see more and more game companies utilize these features as their resource cost drop.
