Al WWDC di San Francisco, Apple ha eretto un muro di video che dimostra la portata di App Store. Contiene ben 30 schermi sincronizzati a LED da 34 pollici che visualizza 50.000 applicazioni mentre vengono scaricate. In pochi minuti, la parete si riempie con 10.800 applicazioni scaricate da tutto il mondo.
Come hanno fatto a fare tutto ciò? Questa è la spiegazione di Apple:
“Questo Hyperwall è alimentato da 30 shermi Mac Pro con Mac OS X Snow Leopard e delle schede grafiche NVIDIA GTX 285. Le applicazioni scaricate dall’App Store, vengono fuse tramite un feed XML ogni 5 minuti. Le App vengono poi programmate e ordinate con Cocoa e Objective-C. I dati successivamente vengono passati a un OpenCL Kernle, che guida l’animazione. Infine Quartz Composer offre tutte le tecnologie per rendere l’output finale sincronizzato con Quartz Composer Visualizer”.
In a rare treat for developers at this year’s WWDC, Apple is showcasing 20,000 of the most popular iPhone apps on a massive hyperwall built out of Cinema Displays — one that pulses in sync with each and every App Store download.
The array, mounted on a wall inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center West, is made up of twenty edge-to-edge 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays, each of which are powered by a Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. One eyewitness says the systems are pooled together in one large, monolithic black box.
Quartz Composer is employed to render the icons rapidly and to automate their behavior. All of the icons are sorted by color and, importantly, aren’t there just for show. While not quite a by-the-second recreation of what’s happening at the App Store — as the results are delayed by five minutes — the “live” mural has each iPhone app’s icon pulse light outwards in a ripple whenever someone downloads that app.
While certain apps tend to pulse more often than others due to popularity, the effect produces an animated digital landscape that draws the attention of nearly everyone in its path.
Apple’s intention with the grid is not just to show the popularity among developers of the App Store — which has swelled to over 50,000 apps in total — but to illustrate that many of the apps they publish are frequently downloaded. The company reminds WWDC attendees that 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute, guaranteeing that the influx of developers descending on San Francisco this week are very much in demand.
