There is no choice when it comes to open standards. It's a Web developer's responsibility to build HTML5, it's a platform vendor's responsibility to include HTML5, it's a browser maker's responsibility to render HTML5, it's a tool-maker's responsibility to make their tools compliant with HTML5. The spec is not optional. Your website also has to use UTF-8 and TCP/IP and ISO MPEG-4.
Consumers use the Web now. Regular people with phones, not tech people with PC's. You can't ask them to patch their system, use an alternate browser, install a plug-in, update a plug-in, or do any kind of I-T work at all. The model is CD/DVD players. A CD put into a CD player has to work. You have to make your CD to Red Book spec, and CD Players have to be to Red Book spec. End of story.
Flash developers do not use the Flash tool to make Flash... that is an Adobe conceit. They use Flash to make Web apps. In the HTML4 era (1999 through 2007), a Web app was HTML4 plus an embedded plug-in for Mac/PC. The entire Web was Mac/PC, and most users were techies. In the HTML5 era (2007 forward), a Web app is HTML5 on any unknown platform. The users are everybody. That is the reality. There are dozens of HTML5 platforms and only Mac/PC has a Flash plug-in. Adobe's FlashPlayer team is less than 8 people. How are that going to support dozens of platforms? How will the 3-4 updates per year be distributed to what will soon be 10 billion devices? Stop holding your breath.
What has to happen is Adobe has to upgrade their nonstandard, proprietary, closed Web app tool to export HTML5 Web apps. They have to respect the Web app spec just as music tool makers had to respect Red Book. End of story.
It's unbelievable to see FSF support a tool where developers write JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and include ISO MPEG-4 and wrap it up in a closed binary that only proprietary software from one vendor can render. Not to mention, Flash is 14 years old and has had 3 different owners. What if Microsoft buys Adobe (with cash) and screws it up even further, or Apple buys Adobe (with cash) and shuts it down? The Web cannot depend on a single $599 Mac/Windows tool to create and publish audio video. In 5 years, the Web will look like TV. Adobe cannot be the only one who makes VCR's. There is not even a Flash authoring tool for Linux!
Standards are not an issue of choice. See HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD which together killed the fucking DVD! No, we are not going to have both standard and nonstandard Web apps. There is only one Web, and it's open, and you can build and publish whatever you want, with any tools, on any platform, as long as you respect the HTML5 spec. Users can use any device, from any manufacturer, to view the Web, as long as that device respects the HTML5 spec. The lack of choice with regards to the spec enables unlimited choice in everything else. See the billion CD/DVD players and exponentially more media and the world enriched by music and movies. Now, we are doing that for the Web with HTML5.
You have to keep Web apps and native apps separate or you say nothing useful on this issue.
In Web apps: HTML5 Web apps are more open than Flash Web apps. Some of my favorite iPhone apps were developed and deployed on Linux, where there are no Flash tools. The Web app platform on iPhone OS is totally unmanaged, you run whatever you like.
In native apps: C is more cross-platform than Flash. Writing in ActionScript in Flash means you run only on the Flash platform. Write in C and you can go anywhere. Porting from PlayStation to iPhone to Palm happens without Adobe. With Flash you are at the mercy of Adobe to put their Flash platform on top of a platform, you're not really cross-platform. Adobe's iPhone OS v3 tools shipped one week after Apple's iPhone OS v4 tools, that is all you need to know to understand how impractical Adobe's position is.
> Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary
Tacky that you missed him say that Apple has proprietary stuff too, but not for the Web.
It's not Firefox and it hasn't really arrived because it's not even alpha (!?) and it only runs on 10% of Android phones. But other than that, the headline is exactly right.
The biggest site on the Web moves from proprietary video playback that only works on Mac and PC to W3C and ISO standards that work universally, and that's "pandering to iPad"?
This update also makes video available on all ARM systems, none of which have FlashPlayer, including other tablets, all smartphones and media players, game consoles, and set-top boxes. It makes the video require a small fraction of the CPU power and battery life on every device. It moves the player code from a proprietary API in a binary to an open API in interpreted code anyone can read. It means the video from consumer cameras doesn't have to be transcoded.
It's weird that the open Web is now some kind of controversial Apple thing.
The flip side is to test I-T hires to see if they have clue one about the company's core business. I can say for sure the I-T where I'm working right now have no idea what the company does or what would help people achieve the company's goals. They just know how to inform people that something is not working and it's Microsoft's fault, not their fault.
This guy needs a new business, because an iPad has replaced my printer. Does all the same things, even uses the same USB port. There's no going back for me.
That's not true. There is plenty of work in all-Mac shops with no I-T support, where I work all the time it is that way. If other systems weren't so fragile, then instead of just keeping them running you could enhance them. I write AppleScripts as I do freelance work, and sometimes I come back a year later to a place and they've been using my AppleScripts all along, because they're customized to exactly the tasks they're doing. Enhancing workflow like that would be a great job for someone who is otherwise running virus scans on a Windows box today.
I just installed a game onto my iPad from a Linux-based server, run by a developer who created the game on a Linux workstation, using free tools, and wrote it to the open HTML5 API. The game not only runs on iPad, but also iPhone/iPod, other mobiles, and on the desktop: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE-with-Chrome-Frame. It runs from local storage, doesn't need a Web connection, and on iPhone OS the icon appears on the home screen next to App Store apps. Of course HTML5 apps are not managed by Apple, they have no involvement other than they built the device and the open source WebKit engine. The developer may not even own an Apple device, but he's making great apps for Apple users.
What Adobe is saying to that developer is: to be more open, buy Windows ($399) and Flash ($599) and recode your game from the open HTML5 API to proprietary Flash API, deploy it as a Flash binary, and it will run in some versions of FlashPlayer on Mac and PC, and no mobiles.
If you're buying that bullshit, then you don't know WTF you are talking about.
The iPad is overflowing with video and with games. It's not obvious on a PC, but many, many Flash-based sites are detecting iPad and showing HTML5-based content. So where you may imagine that we're seeing gaping holes, we're not. I watched the CEO of Adobe in a video on the Fox Business Report website explain that iPhone OS users can't see video on the Fox Business Report website because Steve Jobs is a bad man. But I was watching that on my iPhone. The Adobe CEO doesn't get that the Web has been on mobiles for 3 years and there's no FlashPlayer. Websites have adapted already. An Adobe evangelist, the same one who said "screw you, Apple" put together a list of 10 websites iPad users can't view, but when tested, it turned out 8 of the 10 could be viewed not just on iPad but also iPhone. Adobe is just in deep denial about the world's need for Flash.
So the lack of Flash on iPad has been good for Linux, good for the Web, and good for iPad users.
And it's not like we have a choice anyway: there is no fucking FlashPlayer for mobiles. It simply doesn't exist. Even if Steve Jobs was a rabid Flash fan, the thing simply does not run on ARM yet. All the Apple bashing Adobe is doing is trademark denial.
Windows XP is running on 80% of the PC's and has 32 pixel icons that demand a lo-res display. The average retail of a PC is US$500, again demanding a lo-res display. Sorry that your own company ruined the PC industry by illegally monopolizing it and then failing to move it forward. App developers have to design for XP, even 10 years later, because that's when the PC got frozen in time. The lack of progress should not be a mystery to a Microsoft employee but the fact that it is should scare all of your customers. Or at least those whose PC's are working today, not rebooting their anti-virus scanners.
Google uses the browser engine from the iPad. The idea that Google is going in a different direction than iPad is ridiculous. Apple is as much a part of HTML5 as Google.
Touch was made for the Web. You actually press the buttons, you easily flick to scroll, and pinch to zoom. It is so natural and easy. There's no going back to the mouse once you use touch. This also translates to virtual touch, like Minority Report, to surf on a TV. Direct interaction.
Also, HTML5 (standards-based Web) is more important than ever. More devices, more platforms, more vendors. It is the only way forward. Most devices do not have native apps, they need Web apps. And Web publishing has to get cheaper and easier and more universal as print goes even further away. People need to use basic tools and make universally-accessible Web content.
Finally, ISO MPEG media. Most of the world's published network audio video is in ISO formats. These are the consumer audio video formats. The PC formats are comparitively irrelevant. Cameras and recorders make it, editors edit it, all the consumer devices play it in hardware. All the pro gear is based around the QuickTime container. There's no substitute. The Web will play audio video's formats, not its own format. That's the legacy of the Web doing XHTML instead of audio and video tags in 1999. Audio video came to the Internet via MPEG, not W3C. The royalty-free non-commercial use of ISO media will continue indefinitely. Apple filibustered the original license and got the royalty-free use, and Apple has made it clear it has to continue. Both Apple and Google ave ways to make things bad for MPEG-LA if they try to change that through the last few years of the patent terms, which are not that far away. The thing to understand is the Web will be less text+graphics and much more audio video. TV is going to have its revenge on the Web.
So mouse+IE+Flash is turning into touch+HTML5+MPEG. Much easier, much cheaper, many more platforms, richer media, lots of audio video.
I meet college-age people all the time and they have an iPod and a MacBook. I met some from Texas recently and I thought they would have Dells, but no: iPods, iPhones, and MacBooks. One literally told me "my mom has a Dell."
All is not lost for open source. All 3 of the above devices has open source Unix core systems and open source WebKit HTML5 browser out-of-the-box. And the Mac has Apache and PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby. And the young coders I've met are building on top of Apache.
Linux doesn't do enough on its own for most young people. And they weren't indoctrinated a decade ago when Linux still tried to supplant Windows. So dual-booting Linux/Windows is a drag and PC hardware is a drag. They're working at a higher level than that. They expect a computer to have video editing and iTunes. They expect it to work for 3 years straight while they build websites. The priorities of Linux aren't the priorities of this generation. They're not trying to escape Microsoft through Linux (like Linus), they escaped through Apple.
So it's partly the sickness of the PC platform, partly the limited utility of Linux for modern tasks, partly that this generation is working further up the stack, partly that they're (rightly) spoiled by the Apple Store, and partly that whoever Linux is made for, it's not for iGeneration.
> The writer doesn't realize that Adobe... were making a cross compiler from ActionScript... to Objective-C.
Bullshit. You are totally wrong.
Flash CS5 spits out a finished iPhone OS v3 application package. It doesn't spit out C, it doesn't spit out an Xcode project. The app is already compiled by Flash CS5.
iPhone OS v4 tools are already out. Developers are right now updating their v3 apps so that they run perfectly on v4. iPhone OS users are not supposed to have to think "maybe I shouldn't update to OS v4, in case it breaks my apps" and they are not supposed to update to v4 and find some apps broken. That is why even secretive Apple introduces the next OS a few months ahead of the hardware and releases developer tools at that time. So Adobe is shipping their v3 tools a week after Apple shipped their v4 tools. Adobe Flash is on a 24 month development cycle, and they are already a year behind iPhone OS, which is on a 12 month development cycle. So Flash CS5 which makes v3 apps will be the current version of Flash in mid-2012 when Apple introduces iPhone OS v6. Adobe is slow, painfully slow. We have seen this again and again in the past. They cannot be counted on to keep their developers even a year behind.
The apps Flash CS5 makes are memory hogs, they abuse the CPU and battery, and they either fail to run on iPhone OS v4 or they fail to multitask on iPhone OS v4.
As usual, Adobe failed to deliver what they shot their mouths off about in an anti-Apple PR. They did that in 2007, saying that FlashPlayer for iPhone was ready to go but Steve Jobs wouldn't run it. Then Android came along in 2008 with the same CPU and called Adobe's bluff and they had nothing to show, and even now, FlashPlayer does not run on the CPU from the original iPhone and iPhone 3G.
If Adobe wants to make iPhone OS app tools, they should make fucking HTML5. Their shitty Web app tool should make fucking HTML5.
And you should just shut up about stuff you know nothing about.
Apple WebKit is used by all of Apple's competitors except Microsoft, yet Apple still has the best out-of-the-box Web browsing experience, which only gets better as HTML5 continues to grow in Web development. WebKit enabled Apple to bring desktop browsing to phones in 2007 because it's so fast that it was acceptable even on an ARM 400MHz with 128MB of RAM. It's used throughout their native apps, too, for example in iTunes.
The thing is, Apple profited indirectly. WebKit improved the environment and Apple flourished in that environment to such a degree that the price of developing WebKit was amortized. It's hard for an MBA to understand such public-minded thinking.
App Store is not the Web. Stop conflating it. App Store is the native app platform on Apple's consumer devices, which all also have an open Web platform where you find the Web.
This is not censorship. Wal-Mart doesn't sell some music albums because of content, and that is not censorship. It's not how I would do it, bit I'm not one of the top 5 biggest companies in the US like Apple and Wal-Mart.
Fiore is not banned from Apple devices, which all have totally open W3C HTML5 Web app platforms built-in. He will simply have to collect his own money, Apple does not want to do it.
I started doing Flash development in 1997, and at that time we expected HTML5 to include everything that was in Flash. Instead, we got completely useless XHTML. But now, in HTML5 and ISO audio video we have a vendor neutral alternative to Flash and FLV. There's no excuse for not supporting it.
HTML5 is almost universal on smartphones, while Flash is almost non-existant. Theses devices have hardware ISO video players and too little CPU to avoid the GPU. They're simply not made for Flash.
This bullshit of knocking Apple for a "closed" iPhone because they run HTML5 instead of Flash is fucking ridiculous. Flash closes the fucking Web, there's no excuse for it.
H.264 is in *everything*, even Flash. It's in all the hardware, from smartphones to PC GPU's. Camcorders make it. It's on Blu-Ray and iTunes and YouTube.
This move with VP8 is likely to keep MPEG licensing free from 2016 through the expiration of the patents. It's not going to displace H.264, though. Even if everyone in the world agreed to replace H.264, it would take a decade or more. Even if you don't know it, most of the post-DVD video you've watched was H.264.
An AppleTV has only a 1GHz Pentium M and it does full-screen HD playback of ISO H.264 in its NVIDIA GPU. No fan is needed. No special engineering. Same as a DVD player.
The GPU on Atom systems, NVIDIA Ion, has hardware H.264 decoding that can play HD without much help from the CPU at all.
So in this device you're putting a much bigger CPU and an arrangement of fans in your living room to enable Adobe to continue to lock up ISO video behind their proprietary software video player.
Yeah, that makes no sense at all.
And of course, we all know it's not Adobe's fault there is no FlashPlayer on mobiles yet, 3 years after iPhone. It's Steve Jobs that is keeping Flash off your Blackberry, Android, and Palm phones. Right?
When you consider the Flash tool costs $599, it is expensive at every level.
When you add up all of that, it isn't hard to imagine that it costs us all a combined 16 billion dollars a year to use Flash compared to if it didn't exist and we were running bare ISO H.264 video in the hardware decoders that are built into every device. Adobe is only worth 16 billion. It doesn't make sense.
Get 3 Macs, not 3 Windows machines. There are parental controls built-in, and with Steam they run most of the same games. They also have digital media tools built-in, as well as many special subsystems related to that kind of work, which for kids that age is like the 3 R's. In college they will be using Macs, and people of their generation overwhelmingly use Macs, the skills will be more beneficial than learning Windows. There are no viruses, no scanners are needed, and they're Unix, so they are more Linux-compatible than Windows. They backup automatically to an external volume, and the kids have the Apple Store to do free seminars on whatever they're interested in.
For yourself, use Linux if that's what you're into. But your idea of computing is likely very different from your kids and their generation. They want the computer to disappear and make movies and play social games. It's a car for them, not a hot rod. And most of all, the Mac is part of this century, while Windows is literally their father's 1995 computer.
Macs are all-in-one, complete systems, and there are no low-end models, but with AppleCare you are guaranteed 3 full years of 100% operation of both hardware and software, and then when AppleCare expires, you can sell each Mac for half of what you paid for it, which you out towards the second generation of Macs and they will be cheaper than low-end Dells. So only the first generation is more expensive than low-end PC. You pay full price for your first Mac, but only half price for every subsequent Mac. Over time, not only will the resale value save money, but it comes with $1000 of software you don't have to buy later, and the reliability and lack of need for utility software and I-T time will save you money and time.
I don't think fragmentation is just beginning on Android. Half the phones run v1 and updates are rare. It's fragmented!
One reason businesses are cool to Android is the malware. Until there is an app store with an approval process, businesses are going to stay away from Android. So these guys are going in the right direction with apps.
But the phones can still only hold a small number of apps and there's still no C apps.
Flash and all these other tools should be HTML5-based. That's the open app platform on iPhone. That's the cross-platform mobile API. That's where interpreted code runs.
Cocoa is proprietary to Apple and since it is C-based, it is easy to port apps from other platforms by bringing the C into Xcode. Cocoa is evolving wherever Apple wants to take it. There's no standards body as with HTML5. If Apple introduces a new multitasking model that requires Xcode-built apps then you are out of luck. If snail's pace Adobe can't even ship their iPhone 3 development tools before iPhone 4 then you are out of luck.
iPhone offers 2 distinct app platforms, which are like yin yang, each has the strengths the other lacks. Choose where you want to deploy your app.
It is sad to see Adobe being run into the ground. They've been blaming Apple for a lack of mobile FlashPlayer for 3 years, yet it has not shipped on other mobiles yet. They're blaming Apple for obsoleteing their Cocoa export, but where is their HTML5 export? Flash makes Web apps. Why is it getting an iPhone app export before HTML5? Terrible management at Adobe.
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There is no choice when it comes to open standards. It's a Web developer's responsibility to build HTML5, it's a platform vendor's responsibility to include HTML5, it's a browser maker's responsibility to render HTML5, it's a tool-maker's responsibility to make their tools compliant with HTML5. The spec is not optional. Your website also has to use UTF-8 and TCP/IP and ISO MPEG-4.
Consumers use the Web now. Regular people with phones, not tech people with PC's. You can't ask them to patch their system, use an alternate browser, install a plug-in, update a plug-in, or do any kind of I-T work at all. The model is CD/DVD players. A CD put into a CD player has to work. You have to make your CD to Red Book spec, and CD Players have to be to Red Book spec. End of story.
Flash developers do not use the Flash tool to make Flash ... that is an Adobe conceit. They use Flash to make Web apps. In the HTML4 era (1999 through 2007), a Web app was HTML4 plus an embedded plug-in for Mac/PC. The entire Web was Mac/PC, and most users were techies. In the HTML5 era (2007 forward), a Web app is HTML5 on any unknown platform. The users are everybody. That is the reality. There are dozens of HTML5 platforms and only Mac/PC has a Flash plug-in. Adobe's FlashPlayer team is less than 8 people. How are that going to support dozens of platforms? How will the 3-4 updates per year be distributed to what will soon be 10 billion devices? Stop holding your breath.
What has to happen is Adobe has to upgrade their nonstandard, proprietary, closed Web app tool to export HTML5 Web apps. They have to respect the Web app spec just as music tool makers had to respect Red Book. End of story.
It's unbelievable to see FSF support a tool where developers write JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and include ISO MPEG-4 and wrap it up in a closed binary that only proprietary software from one vendor can render. Not to mention, Flash is 14 years old and has had 3 different owners. What if Microsoft buys Adobe (with cash) and screws it up even further, or Apple buys Adobe (with cash) and shuts it down? The Web cannot depend on a single $599 Mac/Windows tool to create and publish audio video. In 5 years, the Web will look like TV. Adobe cannot be the only one who makes VCR's. There is not even a Flash authoring tool for Linux!
Standards are not an issue of choice. See HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD which together killed the fucking DVD! No, we are not going to have both standard and nonstandard Web apps. There is only one Web, and it's open, and you can build and publish whatever you want, with any tools, on any platform, as long as you respect the HTML5 spec. Users can use any device, from any manufacturer, to view the Web, as long as that device respects the HTML5 spec. The lack of choice with regards to the spec enables unlimited choice in everything else. See the billion CD/DVD players and exponentially more media and the world enriched by music and movies. Now, we are doing that for the Web with HTML5.
You can call H.264 "proprietary" but it is not.
The Ogg vs MPEG-4 debate happened in the 1990's. Having it now is like complaining about DVD Players in 2005.
You have to keep Web apps and native apps separate or you say nothing useful on this issue.
In Web apps: HTML5 Web apps are more open than Flash Web apps. Some of my favorite iPhone apps were developed and deployed on Linux, where there are no Flash tools. The Web app platform on iPhone OS is totally unmanaged, you run whatever you like.
In native apps: C is more cross-platform than Flash. Writing in ActionScript in Flash means you run only on the Flash platform. Write in C and you can go anywhere. Porting from PlayStation to iPhone to Palm happens without Adobe. With Flash you are at the mercy of Adobe to put their Flash platform on top of a platform, you're not really cross-platform. Adobe's iPhone OS v3 tools shipped one week after Apple's iPhone OS v4 tools, that is all you need to know to understand how impractical Adobe's position is.
> Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary
Tacky that you missed him say that Apple has proprietary stuff too, but not for the Web.
It's not Firefox and it hasn't really arrived because it's not even alpha (!?) and it only runs on 10% of Android phones. But other than that, the headline is exactly right.
The biggest site on the Web moves from proprietary video playback that only works on Mac and PC to W3C and ISO standards that work universally, and that's "pandering to iPad"?
This update also makes video available on all ARM systems, none of which have FlashPlayer, including other tablets, all smartphones and media players, game consoles, and set-top boxes. It makes the video require a small fraction of the CPU power and battery life on every device. It moves the player code from a proprietary API in a binary to an open API in interpreted code anyone can read. It means the video from consumer cameras doesn't have to be transcoded.
It's weird that the open Web is now some kind of controversial Apple thing.
The flip side is to test I-T hires to see if they have clue one about the company's core business. I can say for sure the I-T where I'm working right now have no idea what the company does or what would help people achieve the company's goals. They just know how to inform people that something is not working and it's Microsoft's fault, not their fault.
If you are an American and this scares you, then good. War can't be one-sided forever.
This guy needs a new business, because an iPad has replaced my printer. Does all the same things, even uses the same USB port. There's no going back for me.
That's not true. There is plenty of work in all-Mac shops with no I-T support, where I work all the time it is that way. If other systems weren't so fragile, then instead of just keeping them running you could enhance them. I write AppleScripts as I do freelance work, and sometimes I come back a year later to a place and they've been using my AppleScripts all along, because they're customized to exactly the tasks they're doing. Enhancing workflow like that would be a great job for someone who is otherwise running virus scans on a Windows box today.
As little light as possible. Just throw a steak in there from time to time.
I just installed a game onto my iPad from a Linux-based server, run by a developer who created the game on a Linux workstation, using free tools, and wrote it to the open HTML5 API. The game not only runs on iPad, but also iPhone/iPod, other mobiles, and on the desktop: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE-with-Chrome-Frame. It runs from local storage, doesn't need a Web connection, and on iPhone OS the icon appears on the home screen next to App Store apps. Of course HTML5 apps are not managed by Apple, they have no involvement other than they built the device and the open source WebKit engine. The developer may not even own an Apple device, but he's making great apps for Apple users.
What Adobe is saying to that developer is: to be more open, buy Windows ($399) and Flash ($599) and recode your game from the open HTML5 API to proprietary Flash API, deploy it as a Flash binary, and it will run in some versions of FlashPlayer on Mac and PC, and no mobiles.
If you're buying that bullshit, then you don't know WTF you are talking about.
The iPad is overflowing with video and with games. It's not obvious on a PC, but many, many Flash-based sites are detecting iPad and showing HTML5-based content. So where you may imagine that we're seeing gaping holes, we're not. I watched the CEO of Adobe in a video on the Fox Business Report website explain that iPhone OS users can't see video on the Fox Business Report website because Steve Jobs is a bad man. But I was watching that on my iPhone. The Adobe CEO doesn't get that the Web has been on mobiles for 3 years and there's no FlashPlayer. Websites have adapted already. An Adobe evangelist, the same one who said "screw you, Apple" put together a list of 10 websites iPad users can't view, but when tested, it turned out 8 of the 10 could be viewed not just on iPad but also iPhone. Adobe is just in deep denial about the world's need for Flash.
So the lack of Flash on iPad has been good for Linux, good for the Web, and good for iPad users.
And it's not like we have a choice anyway: there is no fucking FlashPlayer for mobiles. It simply doesn't exist. Even if Steve Jobs was a rabid Flash fan, the thing simply does not run on ARM yet. All the Apple bashing Adobe is doing is trademark denial.
Windows XP is running on 80% of the PC's and has 32 pixel icons that demand a lo-res display. The average retail of a PC is US$500, again demanding a lo-res display. Sorry that your own company ruined the PC industry by illegally monopolizing it and then failing to move it forward. App developers have to design for XP, even 10 years later, because that's when the PC got frozen in time. The lack of progress should not be a mystery to a Microsoft employee but the fact that it is should scare all of your customers. Or at least those whose PC's are working today, not rebooting their anti-virus scanners.
These are people who left PA Semi as soon as it was bought by Apple. They had nothing to do with iPad.
Apparently, ex-Intrinsity people had more to do with the A4 than ex-PA Semi people also.
The rumor now is that Apple will buy ARM, which they co-founded to make the Newton.
Google uses the browser engine from the iPad. The idea that Google is going in a different direction than iPad is ridiculous. Apple is as much a part of HTML5 as Google.
Touch was made for the Web. You actually press the buttons, you easily flick to scroll, and pinch to zoom. It is so natural and easy. There's no going back to the mouse once you use touch. This also translates to virtual touch, like Minority Report, to surf on a TV. Direct interaction.
Also, HTML5 (standards-based Web) is more important than ever. More devices, more platforms, more vendors. It is the only way forward. Most devices do not have native apps, they need Web apps. And Web publishing has to get cheaper and easier and more universal as print goes even further away. People need to use basic tools and make universally-accessible Web content.
Finally, ISO MPEG media. Most of the world's published network audio video is in ISO formats. These are the consumer audio video formats. The PC formats are comparitively irrelevant. Cameras and recorders make it, editors edit it, all the consumer devices play it in hardware. All the pro gear is based around the QuickTime container. There's no substitute. The Web will play audio video's formats, not its own format. That's the legacy of the Web doing XHTML instead of audio and video tags in 1999. Audio video came to the Internet via MPEG, not W3C. The royalty-free non-commercial use of ISO media will continue indefinitely. Apple filibustered the original license and got the royalty-free use, and Apple has made it clear it has to continue. Both Apple and Google ave ways to make things bad for MPEG-LA if they try to change that through the last few years of the patent terms, which are not that far away. The thing to understand is the Web will be less text+graphics and much more audio video. TV is going to have its revenge on the Web.
So mouse+IE+Flash is turning into touch+HTML5+MPEG. Much easier, much cheaper, many more platforms, richer media, lots of audio video.
I meet college-age people all the time and they have an iPod and a MacBook. I met some from Texas recently and I thought they would have Dells, but no: iPods, iPhones, and MacBooks. One literally told me "my mom has a Dell."
All is not lost for open source. All 3 of the above devices has open source Unix core systems and open source WebKit HTML5 browser out-of-the-box. And the Mac has Apache and PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby. And the young coders I've met are building on top of Apache.
Linux doesn't do enough on its own for most young people. And they weren't indoctrinated a decade ago when Linux still tried to supplant Windows. So dual-booting Linux/Windows is a drag and PC hardware is a drag. They're working at a higher level than that. They expect a computer to have video editing and iTunes. They expect it to work for 3 years straight while they build websites. The priorities of Linux aren't the priorities of this generation. They're not trying to escape Microsoft through Linux (like Linus), they escaped through Apple.
So it's partly the sickness of the PC platform, partly the limited utility of Linux for modern tasks, partly that this generation is working further up the stack, partly that they're (rightly) spoiled by the Apple Store, and partly that whoever Linux is made for, it's not for iGeneration.
> The writer doesn't realize that Adobe ... were making a cross compiler from ActionScript ... to Objective-C.
Bullshit. You are totally wrong.
Flash CS5 spits out a finished iPhone OS v3 application package. It doesn't spit out C, it doesn't spit out an Xcode project. The app is already compiled by Flash CS5.
iPhone OS v4 tools are already out. Developers are right now updating their v3 apps so that they run perfectly on v4. iPhone OS users are not supposed to have to think "maybe I shouldn't update to OS v4, in case it breaks my apps" and they are not supposed to update to v4 and find some apps broken. That is why even secretive Apple introduces the next OS a few months ahead of the hardware and releases developer tools at that time. So Adobe is shipping their v3 tools a week after Apple shipped their v4 tools. Adobe Flash is on a 24 month development cycle, and they are already a year behind iPhone OS, which is on a 12 month development cycle. So Flash CS5 which makes v3 apps will be the current version of Flash in mid-2012 when Apple introduces iPhone OS v6. Adobe is slow, painfully slow. We have seen this again and again in the past. They cannot be counted on to keep their developers even a year behind.
The apps Flash CS5 makes are memory hogs, they abuse the CPU and battery, and they either fail to run on iPhone OS v4 or they fail to multitask on iPhone OS v4.
As usual, Adobe failed to deliver what they shot their mouths off about in an anti-Apple PR. They did that in 2007, saying that FlashPlayer for iPhone was ready to go but Steve Jobs wouldn't run it. Then Android came along in 2008 with the same CPU and called Adobe's bluff and they had nothing to show, and even now, FlashPlayer does not run on the CPU from the original iPhone and iPhone 3G.
If Adobe wants to make iPhone OS app tools, they should make fucking HTML5. Their shitty Web app tool should make fucking HTML5.
And you should just shut up about stuff you know nothing about.
Apple WebKit is used by all of Apple's competitors except Microsoft, yet Apple still has the best out-of-the-box Web browsing experience, which only gets better as HTML5 continues to grow in Web development. WebKit enabled Apple to bring desktop browsing to phones in 2007 because it's so fast that it was acceptable even on an ARM 400MHz with 128MB of RAM. It's used throughout their native apps, too, for example in iTunes.
The thing is, Apple profited indirectly. WebKit improved the environment and Apple flourished in that environment to such a degree that the price of developing WebKit was amortized. It's hard for an MBA to understand such public-minded thinking.
App Store is not the Web. Stop conflating it. App Store is the native app platform on Apple's consumer devices, which all also have an open Web platform where you find the Web.
This is not censorship. Wal-Mart doesn't sell some music albums because of content, and that is not censorship. It's not how I would do it, bit I'm not one of the top 5 biggest companies in the US like Apple and Wal-Mart.
Fiore is not banned from Apple devices, which all have totally open W3C HTML5 Web app platforms built-in. He will simply have to collect his own money, Apple does not want to do it.
I started doing Flash development in 1997, and at that time we expected HTML5 to include everything that was in Flash. Instead, we got completely useless XHTML. But now, in HTML5 and ISO audio video we have a vendor neutral alternative to Flash and FLV. There's no excuse for not supporting it.
HTML5 is almost universal on smartphones, while Flash is almost non-existant. Theses devices have hardware ISO video players and too little CPU to avoid the GPU. They're simply not made for Flash.
This bullshit of knocking Apple for a "closed" iPhone because they run HTML5 instead of Flash is fucking ridiculous. Flash closes the fucking Web, there's no excuse for it.
H.264 is in *everything*, even Flash. It's in all the hardware, from smartphones to PC GPU's. Camcorders make it. It's on Blu-Ray and iTunes and YouTube.
This move with VP8 is likely to keep MPEG licensing free from 2016 through the expiration of the patents. It's not going to displace H.264, though. Even if everyone in the world agreed to replace H.264, it would take a decade or more. Even if you don't know it, most of the post-DVD video you've watched was H.264.
The video you see in Flash is ISO H.264.
An AppleTV has only a 1GHz Pentium M and it does full-screen HD playback of ISO H.264 in its NVIDIA GPU. No fan is needed. No special engineering. Same as a DVD player.
The GPU on Atom systems, NVIDIA Ion, has hardware H.264 decoding that can play HD without much help from the CPU at all.
So in this device you're putting a much bigger CPU and an arrangement of fans in your living room to enable Adobe to continue to lock up ISO video behind their proprietary software video player.
Yeah, that makes no sense at all.
And of course, we all know it's not Adobe's fault there is no FlashPlayer on mobiles yet, 3 years after iPhone. It's Steve Jobs that is keeping Flash off your Blackberry, Android, and Palm phones. Right?
When you consider the Flash tool costs $599, it is expensive at every level.
When you add up all of that, it isn't hard to imagine that it costs us all a combined 16 billion dollars a year to use Flash compared to if it didn't exist and we were running bare ISO H.264 video in the hardware decoders that are built into every device. Adobe is only worth 16 billion. It doesn't make sense.
Get 3 Macs, not 3 Windows machines. There are parental controls built-in, and with Steam they run most of the same games. They also have digital media tools built-in, as well as many special subsystems related to that kind of work, which for kids that age is like the 3 R's. In college they will be using Macs, and people of their generation overwhelmingly use Macs, the skills will be more beneficial than learning Windows. There are no viruses, no scanners are needed, and they're Unix, so they are more Linux-compatible than Windows. They backup automatically to an external volume, and the kids have the Apple Store to do free seminars on whatever they're interested in.
For yourself, use Linux if that's what you're into. But your idea of computing is likely very different from your kids and their generation. They want the computer to disappear and make movies and play social games. It's a car for them, not a hot rod. And most of all, the Mac is part of this century, while Windows is literally their father's 1995 computer.
Macs are all-in-one, complete systems, and there are no low-end models, but with AppleCare you are guaranteed 3 full years of 100% operation of both hardware and software, and then when AppleCare expires, you can sell each Mac for half of what you paid for it, which you out towards the second generation of Macs and they will be cheaper than low-end Dells. So only the first generation is more expensive than low-end PC. You pay full price for your first Mac, but only half price for every subsequent Mac. Over time, not only will the resale value save money, but it comes with $1000 of software you don't have to buy later, and the reliability and lack of need for utility software and I-T time will save you money and time.
I don't think fragmentation is just beginning on Android. Half the phones run v1 and updates are rare. It's fragmented!
One reason businesses are cool to Android is the malware. Until there is an app store with an approval process, businesses are going to stay away from Android. So these guys are going in the right direction with apps.
But the phones can still only hold a small number of apps and there's still no C apps.
Flash and all these other tools should be HTML5-based. That's the open app platform on iPhone. That's the cross-platform mobile API. That's where interpreted code runs.
Cocoa is proprietary to Apple and since it is C-based, it is easy to port apps from other platforms by bringing the C into Xcode. Cocoa is evolving wherever Apple wants to take it. There's no standards body as with HTML5. If Apple introduces a new multitasking model that requires Xcode-built apps then you are out of luck. If snail's pace Adobe can't even ship their iPhone 3 development tools before iPhone 4 then you are out of luck.
iPhone offers 2 distinct app platforms, which are like yin yang, each has the strengths the other lacks. Choose where you want to deploy your app.
It is sad to see Adobe being run into the ground. They've been blaming Apple for a lack of mobile FlashPlayer for 3 years, yet it has not shipped on other mobiles yet. They're blaming Apple for obsoleteing their Cocoa export, but where is their HTML5 export? Flash makes Web apps. Why is it getting an iPhone app export before HTML5? Terrible management at Adobe.