Entertainment For Lively Minds
Motherhood and Apple pie or Flash: saviour of the universe?
This issue's Wired (my last issue before my cheapo intro sub ends, and finances won't stretch to a new one) has a fascinating feature on the spat between erstwhile bosom buddies Apple and Adobe*.
This dispute is particularly intriguing as it is between two companies on ostensibly the 'same side', unlike the perceived light v dark Apple v Microsoft battle.
Just wondered what the views of the Massive were on this. Instinctively I feel Jobs talks sense (regardless of his probably more base motives for picking a fight) about the future being based around Cascading Style Sheets and HTML5, and I've found Flash-based websites annoying with their constant demands for software upgrades. That said, I have enormous respect for the creator of Photoshop, Illustrator et al.
*brilliant graphics incidentally, with the upside down Apple and Adobe logos representing devilish and clownish features on their respective CEO's.
The writer of this blog was behind the Wired feature, by the way.
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Disingenuous
Chairman Steve has a bigger agenda around Flash. I haven't used Flash player a great deal on a Mac, but I've used it on Windows (where it's generally pretty good) and on Ubuntu (where it often crashes).
But bear in mind the following:
1. If you don't like Flash you can always uninstall it or block websites automatically playing Flash content
2. Jobs has made lots of noises about being behind open standards, but at the same time supports proprietary standards such as H.264. And the iPhone/iPad environment is hardly open either
3. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Flash, it's difficult to use the web without it. As an adult, I'd like to be given the choice to make up my own mind, not have Apple make it up for me
4. My Android phone has Flash Lite. It's okay -- nothing terrible happens if I play Flash content
5. Chairman Steve's biggest problem with Flash is that it's cross-platform and allows applications that run in a web browser, outside of the App Store's walled garden. Excluding Flash from Apple's devices makes sense for Apple's bottom line, but not necesarily for the end-user
6. People with long memories should remember that Adobe probably kept Apple in business, in the bad old days of the mid-to-late 90s. Photoshop and Illustrator were two of the principal reasons to use a Macintosh.
I'd agree to most of that.
'Cept it was also MS Office on Mac that kept a good portion of Apple going during the bad times.
Flash is buggy, slow and crashy, and their security record is abysmal across all the Adobe tools.
And the Jobs strategy (for iPad and iPhone at least) as I see it is the 'walled garden' you'll see mentioned in many places - if you can only get stuff from or through Apple, they're getting a cut. Weaning people off browsers into subscription 'apps' gets people socialised to paying for media along the way.
Not too dissimilar from the Microsoft Network push back in the day, when Microsoft wanted to set up it's own ISP effectively trying to be the contact and transport for as much internet traffic as they could get. That scared the crap out of a lot of people. That was a big one, but people get bent out of shape by about some odd things sometimes.