Evan Sims

NVIDIA releases PhysX-enabled graphics drivers

Having purchased physics processor manufacturer PhysX last February, graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA has been hard at work porting system to run natively on the GeForce GPU rather than the dedicated chipset PhysX had been selling. Today, NVIDIA’s labors came to fruition as they released ForceWare 177.83, the first WHQL certified driver package with PhysX support included.

NVIDIA’s newly embedded PhysX runs on any GeForce 8-series, 9-series, and 200-series desktop graphics card, and simply require the new drivers to work. I imagine all future ForceWare packages will contain PhysX support.

The original PhysX system saw little support from the game development community, with only a handful of studios actually implementing the system into their games. The reason for this was obvious: it required a relatively expensive specialized hardware component to work, and how much of the marketplace would drop $200 on top of their system just for fancier physics? NVIDIA’s integration of PhysX into the heart of their GPU means an instantaneous surge of user base with hardware physics rendering support, which in turn means more game developers will start looking at integrating advanced physics systems like PhysX into their games.

I shouldn’t forget to mention that ForceWare 177.83 also supports CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture, which allows software developers to execute code on the NVIDIA GPU just like they would a standard CPU. The performance advantage of running code against a GPU is staggering, and we’re just beginning to see the real world advantages of this technology with tools like the Folding@Home client.

If you own a GeForce 8 or newer, you can grab the new ForceWare drivers and a whole slew of demo games that take advantage of PhysX at NVIDIA’s new “ForceWithin” site.

Alternatively, you can download the drivers directly from here:

• GeForce ForceWare 177.83 XP (32-bit)
• GeForce ForceWare 177.83 XP (64-bit)
• GeForce ForceWare 177.83 Vista (32-bit)
• GeForce ForceWare 177.83 Vista (64-bit)

Mozilla concept video a glimpse into the real Web 2.0?

“Aurora” is a concept piece by web think tank Adaptive Path for Mozilla, developers of the oh-so-famous Firefox web browser, and is intended to be a forward-thinking look into the future of how web browsers might function, render data and interact with users. The concept, at this stage in the game, is completely absurd of course, but who knows what the future may look like. The web has seen a huge surge of interest in openness with microformats and APIs in the last two to three years, and I don’t expect that to go away anytime soon, but for a concept like Aurora to work we’d need to see a truly open web that developers like I can only dream of at this point.

Update — Adaptive Path has posted several more videos in this Aurora series; they’re currently up to 4 as of this writing. Be sure to check those out as well.

Automattic releases WordPress for iPhone

Guess where I am right now? OK, nowhere exciting, really; but I could blogging from anywhere now, because tonight Automattic- the company responsible for the WordPress blogging platform myself and most of the blogging community uses- has released WordPress for iPhone. It’s free to download from the App Store right now.

WordPress for iPhone isn’t the first method we’ve had for working with our blogs on the mobile device; there are a least a half dozen plugins for creating a more hospitable environment for managing your content on the iPhone, but quite honestly the quality of the ones I’d tried left a lot to be desired.

This app is polished, official and completely native, so you aren’t forced to work on your content from within Safari. Thus far everything I’ve played with has worked flawlessly, and the app is super responsive and smooth, even on very large posts like my previous Gotham Knight review. The app works for iPod Touch and iPhone users alike, but the latter gets several additional bells and whistles, like taking pictures with your phone’s camera and embedding them into new or existing blog entries from the same, integrated UI.

I love this app, and I think a lot if you will too. I believe we’ll be seeing a lot more mobile blogging coming thanks to this, and TypePad’s offering. One feature suggestion foe the next version? Use GPS and include the data as a custom meta variable. We could do all sorts of fun stuff with our archives and Google maps if we had that data inserted automatically for us.

Edit: Here’s an intro video from the website for those who aren’t familiar with the app.

Screenshots

Firefox 3 lands; download it now!

Firefox 3 is arriving today, and brings with it a whole host of lovely new features that I’ve grown to love using the betas and release candidates these last few months.

Some of the features I love in particular:

• The “awesome bar” (a new aspect of the address bar) gives me a central location to not only search my history but also my bookmarks and tags (see the new feature on those.) I can start to type “opendns” and not only will I find any pages I’ve visited recently with opendns in the URL or page title, but also any of my bookmarks with that word in it and bookmarks with that tag. It makes getting from A to B just that much faster.
• The all-new Bookmarks system is a huge improvement over not only Firefox 2 but every other offering out there on the browser market right now. The new system uses a SQLite database to store your bookmarks, reducing potential instances of data corruption and speeding up read/write time over the traditional .HTML file.

  The new UI makes things faster from the user experience, too. Want to bookmark a page your on? No problem! Just hit the star. The page is instantly bookmarked and sorted un an “unfiled” section of your bookmarks so you can manage it later. If you want to customize your bookmark right now, hit that start again and a little dialog pops up allowing you to name your link, tag it, describe it and so forth. All of this additional meta information is used for the “awesome bar” and really allows you to customize your browsing experience.

• Firefox 3 is fast! The new version of the Gecko rendering engine they’ve implemented is noticeably peppier than previous versions. And I can’t forget to the mention the drastically reduced memory consumption- Firefox 3 beats out every other browser on the market in that regard.
• It’s more secure; Mozilla has really beefed up their phising and malware detection system, and what’s more have made it much more obvious in the user interface when you’re browsing a secure site and when you’re not.
• Firefox finally has a native look on every platform. Now it doesn’t matter what OS you’re running the browser on, it’ll fit right in and look great. OS X, Windows 2000/XP, Windows Vista and Linux all have great default UIs that won’t make you cringe anymore.

So, download Firefox 3 today, and tell ‘em Evan sent ya’.

And hey, while you’re at it why not switch to OpenDNS? It makes your browsing experience that much safer, not to mention faster. Like Firefox it’s free, and unlike Firefox it doesn’t even require a download to set up. Just set your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 and you’re done. Not sure how to do that? OpenDNS has a great guide on on the matter right here.

Yesterday’s Apple Keynote in 60 seconds

Awesome. I dig the iPhone 3G changes, and love the price tag for the Touch upgrade; MobileMe sounds really great, though it’s lack of support for non-Safari browsers in it’s bookmark sync makes it a no-go for me. I suppose you could couple it with other options, like Foxmarks, but I love an integrated option. Also, Apple’s choice in the “me” font brought back some very bad memories for me.

Here’s the full video, complete with exceedingly boring third party app demos, for the masochists among us.