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Gruber will come up with a justification even if Steve Jobs urinates in his face and shits on his head.

Hmm... this would be the same Gruber who wrote that the App Store's exclusion of applications which "compete with" Apple's own offerings is "seriously wrong"? The one who said (same link) that "[i]f this is truly Apple's policy, it's a disaster for the platform"? The same Gruber who said, of Apple's policies, "they shouldn't be doing this"? The same Gruber who said of Apple's inscrutable rejections of applications which violate no SDK guidelines that "[r]ules you disagree with are frustrating. Rules you don't know about are scary"?

Is that the Gruber you're talking about here?

Gruber will come up with a justification even if Steve Jobs urinates in his face and shits on his head.

Hmm... this would be the same Gruber who wrote that the App Store's exclusion of applications which "compete with" Apple's own offerings is "seriously wrong"? The one who said (same link) that "[i]f this is truly Apple's policy, it's a disaster for the platform"? The same Gruber who said, of Apple's policies, "they shouldn't be doing this"? The same Gruber who said of Apple's inscrutable rejections of applications which violate no SDK guidelines that "[r]ules you disagree with are frustrating. Rules you don't know about are scary"?

Is that the Gruber you're talking about here?

Gruber will come up with a justification even if Steve Jobs urinates in his face and shits on his head.

Hmm... this would be the same Gruber who wrote that the App Store's exclusion of applications which "compete with" Apple's own offerings is "seriously wrong"? The one who said (same link) that "[i]f this is truly Apple's policy, it's a disaster for the platform"? The same Gruber who said, of Apple's policies, "they shouldn't be doing this"? The same Gruber who said of Apple's inscrutable rejections of applications which violate no SDK guidelines that "[r]ules you disagree with are frustrating. Rules you don't know about are scary"?

Is that the Gruber you're talking about here?

If what they've done for the iPhone is [to get] a Java ME runtime running on the iPhone

Opera Mini has already been ported to non-Java version(s), stated by haavard here, referring to a Opera press release from as far back as 2007. Gruber speculates that it's because a JavaScript intepreter would clearly break with the SDK Agreement, however as seen in this interview, Opera Mini doesn't have to interpret JavaScript at all, nor render web pages - this can all be done on the servers.

Much of John Gruber's site is an apology journal for Apple's less reasonable activity. When he doesn't have a concrete argument, he resorts to specious hand-waving; when his hands are tired out, he resorts to whispers from "sources". He's the worst sort of evangelist - he's on full warp not when he's giving praise for Apple, but when he's insulting some individual or group he disagrees with.

I am typing this from my primary workstation, an iMac. I think OS X is a fine mainstream operating system. But I don't think Apple are a particularly stellar corporation. I heartily recommend people actually read a few articles from Gruber's daringfireball.net to analyse the fallacies in his reasoning otherwise. Frustrated by his words, you may wish to respond on his site, but be warned: like any zealot, he sees opposition as justification for his mission. At best, you'll be ignored; at worst, something you say will be the subject of a mocking article.

An practitioner earns his reputation in some field - as genius, mediocre, or buffoon - and Gruber has, by his site, earnt the third label.

People angry that Apple rejected Opera on the iPhone should probably read John Gruber at Daring Fireball, who investigated this and found out that it doesn't seem to have happened at all, since Opera hasn't submitted the browser to Apple yet, let alone had it rejected. You can be angry at Apple for their ham-handed handling of the App Store as much as you like, but the "Opera rejected by Apple" story is, so far, from the Precrime files.

While in one month the company may not recover the cost of the prize, the possibility of generating enough of sales to earn a quarter of a million dollars is there.

Why do I mention $250,000? Because that's how much Steve Demeter's puzzle game Trism earned between 11 July and 18 September.

This mentioned by John Gruber on the very day.

My best guess is that if this prize money get the company many downloads, the company may easily make back it's money in the first week.

Probably too late to get noticed, so I'm replying to the first +5 comment I see. There's a good chance the "do not talk about your rejected app" deal is just a result of a boilerplate notice.

One developer, who writes only Mac software, not iPhone software, emailed:

I trawled through my emails to find bug reports and other correspondence from Apple Developer Connection (of which there is quite a bit).

Every one has the text:

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE

While I don't agree with Apple's practices in this case, the NDA notice on the email is just from one of the individuals working in App Store Review. It's also the same signature that comes out with a lot of stock apple mails (eg bug report responses) http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/app_store_rejections has a good summary of events.

What a bad article for Slashdot. Come on, the Dashboard/Konfabulator-story has been crunched numerous times already, only to end up with Apple having had a "Dashboard" 20 years _before_ Konfabulator came out.

FAIL, try again.

(...but I must agree a patent on something so basic like this info-screen ist ridiculous)

I think John Gruber has the most sensible take on Microsoft's claim that this was planned all along:

The most telling fact is that the firm that reached out to the media yesterday to explain that this sudden shift was supposedly the plan all along was not Crispin Porter, the advertising agency producing the campaign, but Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's PR firm. Advertising campaigns which are going according to plan do not need PR firms to assert such.

Yes, let nerds and technical users who wouldn't touch a byte of that privacy killer fork it and they stop bitching about it.

While on it, keep feeding data from the 98% percent, non technical users.

If it was Microsoft or even Apple (in recent mood), it was easy to put up a conspiracy theory like that but when it is Google, they will kill you. Not "them", people actually buying their "We are not evil" claim.

With their current policy, OS X and Linux users are lucky that they don't have a native Google browser on their systems. As you know, privacy defender/security apps aren't such advanced on both operating systems because of market.

OS X users should ask themselves, do they need another thing like that: http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/google_desktop_installer ?

If people like Webkit way of things, there is Apple Safari and Apple doesn't do such EULA tricks yet, especially on Windows. About "each tab on new process" ? Well, time to choose a less crashing browser ;)

CEO Michael Dell, October 2007, on being asked what he'd do if he were CEO of Apple:

"I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Since then DELL stock has gone up by 72%... while AAPL has gone up 3080%.

Dell's basic problem has been known for a while. They don't do anything unique. They were one of the first to "get" just-in-time custom manufacturing and they rode that horse for a long time, but everything they do, others can do better -- and apparently do.

Innovation, if it can be sustained, always wins over efficiency, because innovative hardware and software design can empower users by orders of magnitude, while efficiency gains approach an ideal asymptotically.

If you are interested in how things work, this would give clue about Google developers and their "don't do evil" motto.

http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/google_desktop_installer

I am sure you will be really surprised. The most amazing part is, their ignorance of Apple's "Don't touch my /System! It belongs to me and kernel driver developers!" rule. All of that horrible security issue for? Some Spotlight clone.

Isn't Applescript more or less the poster child for why "english like" languages are a bad idea?

Don't confuse Apple with its lawyers. Apple gets sued regularly over frivolous bullshit like Paystar's, so the the company's legal team is a ravenous bunch of sharks.

The Wired sensationalism about lawyers' overstated legalese asking not to get unsolicited idea submissions outside of the "sign away your rights" web form for feedback is to prevent a case where somebody sends in an idea Apple is already working on, sort of like sending the violated IP to a clean room team. Of course they don't want to get sued, and lawyers overreact to protect their assets.

Microsoft isn't "evil" for bundling software, it violated its consent decree (its agreement with the judge in a legal case) in order to destroy competition. Apple has no consent decree to violate, and has not been charged by the US with anti-competitive behaviors. So you're grasping at straws.

Jobs does not own the RIAA's music, so he can only do what they allow him to do. He replaced strong Windows Media DRM from Microsoft with FairPlay DRM that end users can strip off themselves using iTunes burn function. So again, you are being ridiculous.

Apple does not have a moral obligation to hand its IP over to Microsoft just because it did once already in the mid 80s. The "little guy" you are rooting for here is a convicted monopolist. It's like you're complaining about Bernhard Goetz being criminal.

Apple never "forced the installation of Safari," it presented it as a software update. Microsoft presents new versions of its own browser as a software update, on both the Mac (when it did) and Windows. Again, you are being wildly disingenuous.

Linking to Leander Kahney's wildly problematic rant/ad for his book doesn't help your case, because Kahney has a loose grasp of reality and contradicts himself repeatedly.

As John Gruber noted (and thank God, as it spared me from explaining exactly why Kahney is so full of himself):

"Kahney's central premise, insofar as there is a premise, is that Apple has succeeded either despite or because it operates in ways that are contrary to conventional wisdom. [... Kahney says Apple is] "Irredeemably evilâ. Because they're secretive and develop closed platforms. Think about that."
[...]
"One can argue (as I would) that Apple's product secrecy is worth tens of millions of dollars in publicity every year. Or, one can argue that Apple spitefully pissed away even more valuable publicity by shutting down Think Secret. (You'd be wrong, but you can reasonably argue that.) But Kahney, in the course of seven paragraphs in a single article, argues both."
[...]
"So this is the sort of logic, research, and insight that passes for a Wired cover story today. Does anyone at Wired even read this shit before publishing it?"

Perhaps you should base your world view on facts rather than emotional tirades from Apple's critics to somehow defend why it is that Apple owes you its technology in a subsidized PC in addition to the subsidized iPhone you can already get.

How Leander Kahney Got Everything Wrong by Being an Irredeemable Jackass

Is Apple's MobileMe Secure?

The quoted article is wrong. YOU read the article I linked to ealier. It's right.

The reason the file is buried deep inside CoreLocation is because it's a blacklist for preventing specifically listed applications from accessing CoreLocation, not for disabling them. This is for obvious privacy reasons. Here's Gruber's explanation from a few days ago.

Have you read this?

Seriously, no, it is theCore Location Blacklist. He got it from the Daring Fireball link he included in his comment. Apple does claim that there is a capability to remotely disable applications. He does not claim that the URL to the Core Location Blacklist is that capability.

No. This is a Core Location Black List. It stops listed apps from retrieving your current location. But it doesn't stop that app from working otherwise.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/core_location_blacklist :

"An informed source at Apple confirmed to me that the âoeclblâ in the URL stands for âoeCore Location Blacklistâ, and that it does just that. It is not a blacklist for disabling apps completely, but rather specifically for preventing any listed apps from accessing Core Location â" an API which, for obvious privacy reasons, is covered by very strict rules in the iPhone SDK guidelines."

ok so let me understand this. I buy a phone, I write software for my phone, apple can tell me to piss off and that my applications dont meet their guidelines? Ok so they dont know about my application until I share it with others, which btw appears to not be allowed since they want you to use the store that they get 30% off the sales of. Hmm.. something just does not seem that right here.

If I own the phone I should be able to run any app I choose to. If Apple wants to blacklist an app then really it should ask me for permission to do that on *my* phone, and so far no one has suggested that there is a confirmation (anyone with an iphone can test this, edit /etc/hosts, change the IP to your server, have it spit out valid formatted blacklists for an app and see if there is a confirmation).

As long as big brother is there telling me what I can and cannot run I somehow think I will choose something else.

BTW this exact feature was to be in vista, code was written, but eventually due to marketing concerns it was abandoned. It seemed that people did not like the fact that microsoft would have control over what apps could do what on their system. Funny how it seems much more acceptable when apple does the same thing.

Update:

It is not a blacklist for disabling apps completely, but rather specifically for preventing any listed apps from accessing Core Location -- an API which, for obvious privacy reasons, is covered by very strict rules in the iPhone SDK guidelines.

These privacy concerns are somewhat GPS-related. Could anyone explain further? Too early right now for any place to have significant info on this..

p.s: While I'm backing down a little (since it's not a "zOMG teh remote bricking!!11"), I stand by the uncalled-for phone-home though - it still stinks.

Sorry guys. This is brouhaha over nothing. The blaclist in question does NOT disable apps remotely but instead disallows listed apps form accessing the CoreLocation framework. See http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/core_location_blacklist

http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/core_location_blacklist : "An informed source at Apple confirmed to me that the âoeclblâ in the URL stands for âoeCore Location Blacklistâ, and that it does just that. It is not a blacklist for disabling apps completely, but rather specifically for preventing any listed apps from accessing Core Location â" an API which, for obvious privacy reasons, is covered by very strict rules in the iPhone SDK guidelines."

That shouldn't matter, as many people can work on the same project, right? It's like John Gruber says -- it's about the people with design skills having no authority and just getting ignored.

There are also plenty of people who understand code, and can even code a bit themselves, that understand usability issues, but most of them know that it's a bit pointless to try and get involved when you'll just be ignored.

At the bottom the article links to John Gruber's "Ronco Spray-on Usability" article, which also provides a lot of background on the challenges of good interface design.

In the original article, I think the most important point is number 8 - "Scratching their own itch." I can see how programmers interested in, for example, having a stable and scalable web server would work on Apache. I don't see the same passion coming from a human interface designer to fix, for example, the horrible user interface for joining wireless networks on desktop linux.

In my opinion the only way the user interface will get fixed is if Ubuntu or another distro pays for expert user interface folks to fix UI issues. I don't see the volunteer community being up to the task.

Well, I RTFA and while the data from the TechCrunch posting is quite interesting, the conclusion drawn from the blog post mentioned in the blurb is missing one important factor:

It takes Apples R&D budget and spreads it over the total number of employees from Apple. It then gets to the conclusion that Apple has underpaid its software engineers especially in the last few years as the R&D budget was not nearly as big as it should have been for the number of employees Apple has.

The problem with this conclusion is found in this article, which estimates that half of Apples employees are now working in retail i.e. in an Apple Store. Since Google and the likes do not have a brick and mortar business, so most employees are actually engineers, the simple calculation from the article might work there, but with Apple, it is a bit more complicated than that, especially since the retail store business has just been built in the last couple years

Dont understand me wrong, Apple could still by all means underpay its engineers, but the conclusion of the article is too simple, I think.

Rob Enderele, Rob Enderele, Rob Enderele, where do I know that name?

ah, thats where
http://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/2007/09/24/sco-linux-and-rob-enderle-a-conclusion/
http://daringfireball.net/2003/12/enderle
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34004/128

As far as i'm concerned, that man has ZERO credibility.

The more they tighten their grip, the more customers will slip through their fingers...

I think that John Gruber nailed it. By halving the price and rolling out in 70 countries simultaneously, Apple is going for market share in a huge way. If you thought the hype leading up to the US launch last June was over the top, I think you'd better go hide in a cave in the weeks leading up to July 11th. The global excitement and anticipation will feed on itself and drown out any other consideration, as far as the general public is concerned. The iPhone noise is going to be so loud that other mobile manufacturers are going to be completely drowned out, and they damned well know it. Nothing they do between now and the launch of iPhone 2.0 will even register on the public consciousness; they see the train coming and can't get off the track. I strongly suspect that July 11th will ring in like the crack of doom for most of them.

I was seriously considering getting one of the new 3G iPhones, but now I will definitely not.

Ah, but don't you see, like most Slashdotters, you fail to realize that you are not an ordinary consumer of electronics. The iPhone wasn't designed for you, and the marketing isn't aimed at you. The general public, however, is going to leap at the iPhone like a trout going for a fly. As bizarre as it may seem to people on this and other tech forums, in-store activation is going to be seen as a huge draw for Joe and Jane Consumer, to whom even the relatively simple iTunes activation is a pain in the butt. They want the instant gratification of buying their new iPhone and being able walk out of the store boasting to their friends: "OMG Joanie! Guess what I'm using to call you!!"

I think that Gruber is absolutely correct: the iPhone only has two new hardware features, namely, 3G networking and GPS, which means Apple was concentrating on getting a cheaper 3G iPhone into the hands of as many consumers as possible. Money quote:

"The physical phone is not the story. A year from now, the iPhone 3G will be replaced by another new model. The platform is the story. Platforms have staying power, and, once entrenched, are very hard to displace."

Bold emphases mine. The platform is indeed the story, and Microsoft is painfully aware of what Apple is trying to do (and may very well succeed at doing), namely producing the gateway device to Web 2.0 and their true bid for world domination, the iTunes Store. People pay billions each year for ringtones for God's sake, not because they're worth that much, but because of the convenience of being able to get it instantly. You had better believe that they'll happily pay through the nose for the convenience of having music, video, games, etc. right at their fingertips. It's all about impulse purchasing, something retailers have known about for decades, which is why candy and other high margin items are located right at grocery checkout stands. People will pay for instant gratification and not regret it.

Google can get very evil unless you don't trust them based on their motto "Do no evil".

Google Desktop search is an example how to spare thousands of engineer hours needlessly just to duplicate spotlight and make those "maccies" extremely paranoid.
http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/google_desktop_installer

John Gruber isn't a tinfoil hat and I don't know if Google fixed those horrible dangerous method of installing. Rule number 1 on OS X: You never, ever write to /System

Google should ask their Apple buddies one, simple question: "Why do you code spotlight in a way that it never, ever connects to internet". It is still same on Leopard, Spotlight connects _only_ to XServe on local network if it is configured to do so. It is also the framework which Apple uses every kind of counter measure for security whether they are ready for third party or not.

>>> Exherbo is a distribution designed for people who know what they're doing with Linux.

Are you so badass that gentoo is like ripping candy out of newb babie hands? Exherbo!

>>> Although it shares some code with Gentoo, and although many concepts are similar, and although many of the people involved were or are Gentoo developers, most Exherbo code is rewritten from scratch.

We know way more than those Gentoo tards will ever know.

>>> Exherbo is not, at the moment, a user-targeted distribution.

Come on... you want it, don't you? You want to be so badass to use my awesome distro, to be the most leetest person ever.

>>> It's not that we think that Gentoo is bad.

Gentoo is wretched for our godly needs.

>>> OK, I Want to Try Exherbo

I am high as a kite.

>>> Right now, all we care about is getting it into a fit state for a small number of developers.

We're announcing this publicly because we have no idea what product we're presenting, but we'll make it sound fucking awesome compared to everything else, plus way wore leetsauce, so we can get some actual developers to contribute something useful to make our project objectively good.

>>> The above paragraph does not apply if your pet project is something we find interesting.

Again, if you have anything that will make this distro more than a publicity stunt, for the love of god, please let us know.

>>> It's not that we hate you (unless we do).

Forgot how much better we are then you? You did? OK, in conclusion, fuck you.

• Faster startup,
• faster rendering and scripts,
• faster page loading,
• polished UI,
• more advanced/less buggy engine,
• cool experimental CSS.

Trying to strip out HTML you don't want users to use without mangling the output is very very hard.

Not really. Add a checkbox to enable HTML. If it's not enabled, escape those less than symbols for them -- and detect URLs, and other things.

Preview, blah blah, whatever.

Do the preview in Javascript. Not Ajax, just straight Javascript, client-side, as they type. Gracefully degrade to a preview button.

Unless you're running an intelligent auto-correcting validator like Tidy, or you're parsing the document into a valid object model and then deleting nodes that way (both quite CPU expensive options, compared to running some regular expressions against a string

Regular expressions can be both CPU intensive and wrong. Just look at a real email validator, which I would paste here, but the lameness filter won't let me.

Tell me that isn't error prone, or at least CPU-intensive. (And remember, you're dealing with individual comments, most of them short -- and it's a massively parallizable problem.)

The second reason is convenience features -- instead of making the user write

evanbd said:

It's a web site. You use HTML.

, you can just have them write [quote=evanbd]It's a web site. You use HTML.[/quote], and the parser will convert that intelligently into valid HTML.

Or you could just make the blockquote by itself, and rely on the fact that a properly threaded view will show who you were replying to, anyway.

There's also many better choices for convenience, and most BBCode is going to be generated by the wanna-be-WYSIWYG buttons on the forum.

If you decide down the line that you want to change the code that's outputted for whatever reason, all you need to do is change the application logic and clear out the caches.

Or apply CSS.

And to be fair to the poster, before this new comment system, Slashdot used to say below the post box what HTML could be used.

Oh, they got rid of that? I didn't realize... I'm deliberately still using the old comment system.

Let's compare. In HTML:

<a href="http://example.com/rick_astley">get rick rolled</a>

And in BBCode:

[url=http://example.com/rick_astley]get rick rolled[/url]

It saves you a grand total of three characters. It is arguably more intuitive, at the expense of meaning that someone coming from BBCode won't necessarily understand HTML -- and HTML is actually a web standard. And the fact that every forum seems to use its own markup makes it even worse.

You know what I think? I think BBCode was invented because at some point, someone found it easier to create a parser of something entirely different (and escape out anything HTML-ish) than to simply enforce a subset of HTML. The fact that the second link from Google (after Wikipedia) on a search for bbcode takes me to phpbb is kind of a dead giveaway that it was some lazy PHP coding.

Besides, there are even simpler syntaxes out there, if ease of use or ease of typing was the goal. There's WYSIWYG editors for HTML, there's Markdown, Haml, and more. If I wanted to save people from the horrible complexity of HTML, bbcode would be about dead last on my list.

Anyone know of it? I am using the Gruber Dark color scheme with bbcolors (see here), which is nice but a bit too much contrast. Has anyone done a zenburn scheme for bbcolors?

I'm sure Apple was alerting Adobe to the Carbon issue long before WWDC 2007.

Actually, John Gruber claims that's not true:

Several sources have confirmed to me that Adobe found out that Apple was dropping support for 64-bit Carbon at the same time everyone else outside Apple did: on the first day of WWDC 2007.

According to DaringFireball, the vulnerability was in PCRE. So your baseless speculation (that the vulnerability was in Safari's URL bar) was completely wrong. And by the way, lots of other Unix software uses the PCRE library, so this vulnerability's scope is probably not just constrained to Safari and probably exists in Linux distros as well (maybe even somewhere in Ubuntu, depending on the version they're using).

As a postscript on the "no background apps" policy, a source confirmed to me that the iPhone AIM client AOL demoed during the iPhone Roadmap event does not cheat by continuing to run in the background -- it quits when you switch to another app, but doesn't log you out of AIM automatically. Such a client can't notify you of IM messages from the background (a la the way the iPhone notifies of you SMS messages), but when you switch back to the AIM app, messages you missed should appear. Be wary of claims that "An app that does X is impossible without background processing."

Gruber brings up a few good points on the background apps issue http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/one_app_at_a_time

http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/one_app_at_a_time

It's a really good write up. I love how people instantly try to vilify apple for it's decision, not to allow third party background apps when a majority of Apples own apps for the iPhone do not use background processing. Perhaps simply it's a resources issue. Battery is the resource that everyone thinks of first, but like any small computer system the iPhone has limited CPU and RAM, push those and you are going to kill the battery even faster.

John Gruber had a good write-up about this at: One App at a Time

Gruber brings up a few good points on the background apps issue http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/one_app_at_a_time

Ok. CDs cost money to produce, but the article is dated, and I think a more interesting question with respect to the cost of music is "how do the costs translate to online sales?" I am clearly guessing here, but if anyone else has real numbers, please reply. Given that everyone likes to talk about Radiohead's "In Rainbows", I'll base my estimates on that. The album has 10 songs, so...

Online Distribution (10 songs / CD)

$0.17 - Musicians' unions - no change
$0.22 - Packaging/manufacturing - 2% of revenue to license mp3 format for content distribution, AAC is free for distribution, don't know about Fairplay DRM.
$0.82 - Publishing royalties - no change
$1.00 - Retail profit - 12 @ $.10/song
$0.10 - Distribution - Bandwidth ~5MB/song (downloaded from Radiohead) = 50 MB * 0.0005/MB=$.025 (the estimate is for Video on Demand, but that's all I could find). I bumped it up a little to cover hardware maintenance.
$1.60 - Artists' royalties - no change
$1.70 - Label profit - no change
$2.40 - Marketing/promotion - no change
$2.91 - Label overhead - no change
$0.00 - Retail overhead - not sure

Total: $10.92

Apple sells "In Rainbows" for $9.99. Amazon sells it for $7.99 as a download. I don't believe Apple loses money on downloads. I'm not sure about Amazon. While this is strictly hypothetical, it would seem the difference between a $15 CD and a $10 downloaded album is more than just the cost of production and distribution of the CD. Assuming I'm not totally off on my numbers, and the numbers that aren't related to production and distribution do not change, it should not be possible for Apple to sell the record for $10 or Amazon for $8. I believe the pricing model must allow for online retailers to make a profit, so what makes up the difference? Are the labels giving up profits? Are they operating more efficiently than they used to?

Yea. Apple takes care of notifying users of updates. Apple takes care of bandwidth and server costs. Apple takes care of anti-piracy. Sounds rather nice to me. I'd be willing to give up only 30% of my possible profit to avoid all those different headaches. If your application becomes popular, those things can get complex and expensive.

It will be interesting to see what some of the Mac Developer Bloggers think about this (Daniel Jalkut, John Gruber, and Wil Shipley for example).

Interesting and sensible piece of Gruber, who thinks no-flash is more a political than a technical decision:
http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus

Not really.

-Ted