iPhone and iPad no-Flash policy vindicated by crappiness of Droid 2 Flash player

The iPhone and iPad don’t have the ability to play Flash content because Flash is a crappy, outdated, buggy, unsafe, battery-chewing, processor-killing piece of crap – so says Apple CEO Steve Jobs, if not in those exact words, then essentially with that sentiment. Web content makers are already abandoning Flash in favor of twenty-first century technologies like HTML 5, and it’s telling that the most common complaint about not being able to display Flash on an iPhone comes when the user is attempting to load the notoriously outdated MySpace. And while Flash maker Adobe begs to differ as it enthusiastically pushes the idea that Flash will soon be thriving on every mobile device except the iPhone and iPad, there’s bad news for Adobe on that front: a leading self-identified “geek” journalist has just declared Flash to be a disaster on his non-iPhone. In the words of Laptop Magazine’s Avram Piltch, “After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.”

Meanwhile, the iPhone and iPad have more than two hundred thousand third-party apps available through the App Store, none of which require Flash. While leading geeks have been confidently predicting the demise of the iPhone due to its lack of Flash support since 2007, and making the same claims about the iPad’s demise since before the product even officially existed, it now appears that geek sentiment toward Flash is finally starting to change now that the Flash-enabled Droid has fallen victim to exactly what Steve Jobs warned would happen to the iPhone if Flash were enabled on it. Not that the geek world has ever been a relevant driving force (positive or negative) when it’s come to the mainstream fate of either the iPhone or the iPad (the last time the geeks predicted success for an Apple product, it was the ultimately weak-selling Mac mini), but one has to wonder if, with even the geeks now turning against Adobe’s continued Flash debacle, what strategy will the company now adopt? Will Adobe finally give up the ghost of Flash, or will its head of PR merely continue referring to tech journalists as twerps and comparing Steve Jobs to Josef Stalin? Time will tell.

Adobe employee calls journalist “twerp” for criticizing Flash

Adobe may have a problem on its hands beyond the fact that public opinion is turning against its Flash technology faster than you can say “FarmVille iPad app.” John Dowdell, who identifies himself as an Adobe employee and blogs on adobe.com has taken to using his Twitter account @jdowdell to publicly attack journalists who don’t have positive things to say about his company’s Flash technology. After the publication MacDailyNews criticized ESPN.com for using Flash, Dowdell publicly referred to the MacDailyNews writer as a “twerp” and “dumb” in the same sentence. In fact we here at Beatweek were only made aware of it after Mr. Dowdell also subsequently publicly lashed out at us after we referred to Adobe’s Flash as being ancient (Mr Dowdell also publicly insinuated that Beatweek has some kind of hidden monetary or compensational relationship with Apple, which for the record, we do not). While we’ve been called far worse and we fully respect the right of individuals to calls us by whatever ugly names they wish via their own Twitter accounts, we find it disturbing that Adobe’s obsession with propping up Flash has now extended to its employees publicly attacking journalists. It’s not immediately clear whether the Twitter account is considered an Adobe account or whether employee was speaking on behalf of Adobe, as his Twitter account does link to his blog at adobe.com but uses the employee’s own name for a Twitter username.

Again, we’re not looking to get the specific employee in trouble. But that Adobe’s employees would sink to such depths as Flash continues to circle the bowl is endemic of Adobe’s seeming disturbing desire to bet the entire company on Flash as somehow being the future.

Just in case the employee removes the tweet and then claims it never existed, here you go:

FTC to waste your money investigating Apple after Google, Adobe whine

The FTC will investigate Apple to see whether its upcoming launch of an advertising network and its refusal to allow the ancient Flash technology onto its devices represent a violation of the law. In an investigation that should take two to three minutes, the federal government is bound to embarrass itself one way or the other once it quickly realizes that Flash is as outdated as the floppy drive and Google, not Apple, dominates the online advertising market. In fact, Google’s recent complaints about Apple’s entry into the advertising market may have helped spur the FTC investigation, according to the WSJ. If so, it may represent the first time that a company with a full monopoly over a market has managed to convince the government to preemptively investigate a competitor for no reason at all while it still had zero percent of that market. The development is even more bizarre when one considers that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board of directors at the time Apple was secretly developing products like the iPhone, which Google has subsequently directly copycatted; it’s not clear why Apple hasn’t taken any retaliatory legal action against Schmidt beyond forcing him off the board; perhaps these new developments will spur Apple into pursuing that long overdue course of action.

Accordingly, Adobe’s anti-competitive complaints about Apple not allowing Flash development on the iPhone or iPad are ironic in that Adobe acquired Flash as a throw-in in the deal to acquire its biggest competitor Macromedia specifically to no longer have to face competition from the latter’s Dreamweaver software, which was dominating the corresponding Adobe product. Moreover, the FTC investigation misses the fact that Flash is more than a decade old and is already in the process of being replaced by new industry standards developed by a consortium of companies; even rival Microsoft has publicly intimated that they see Flash as being in the rear view mirror.

Finally, with its actions today makes it clear that the FTC fails to understand the difference between corporations that are aggressive in their desire to advance the state of consumer technologies for the benefit of consumers, and corporations that are merely ruthless in their desire to eliminate any competitor which might be gaining on them. If the FTC’s role is indeed to protect the interests of consumers, then today’s action by the agency represents both a waste of its time and a waste of your money; in fact the FTC is harming consumers by forcing Apple to stop and deal with this nonsense, taking its focus away from the innovation that the company has demonstrably delivered for consumers time and again over the past decade.

Meanwhile, the government allows other technology industries to run amok unchecked, including the thoroughly out of control cellular carrier industry, to the universal detriment of the public.

Apple introduces iPhone 4 (not 4G) front facing camera, A4, HD, iMovie

Apple has introduced the iPhone 4 (not the “iPhone 4G”) which is hails as twenty-four percent thinner than the previous iPhone and the “thinnest smartphone on the planet.” The new iPhone 4 features a front facing camera as well as another camera on the back with a flash, and a frame which uses the outer edge as part of the antenna. The new iPhone 4 looks surprisingly like the one Gizmodo found in a bar last month.

Jobs also stated that iPhone 4 has something called “Retina Display” built into its screen which display on-screen text at what Jobs says is a breakthrough level of quality. iPhone 4 also has a built in six way gyroscope, which app developers can program for. The iPhone’s camera also has a 5x digital zoom. The built in camcorder also records HD video, recording in 720p at 30fps. Jobs also introduced an iMovie app for iPhone

source: live stream from Endgadget

Adobe reports critical Flash flaw, will Steve Jobs say I told you so?

Adobe has reported the discovery of a “critical” security flaw in its Flash software, just weeks after Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained that Flash’s lack of security was one of several reasons he didn’t want the aging technology on Apple’s iPad or iPhone devices in any capacity. The latest Flash security flaw could allow a hacker to take over a user’s entire computer simply by exploiting its Flash installation, according to CNET. While these kinds of attacks generally only take place within the imaginations of the internet’s most paranoid users, the timing of the flaw’s discovery must certainly be leaving Adobe feeling like it has egg on its face. Meanwhile, Apple’s Jobs won’t even bother having to say “I told you so” – although with his next scheduled public presentation scheduled to take place in a mere forty-eight hours, he just might do so anyway.

Five iPad “controversies” that turned out to be irrelevant

With the iPad reaching the two million units sold milestone today in fifty-nine days on the market, sales of the tablet have surpassed the expectations of everyone involved, likely including even that of Apple itself. So with the iPad now an inarguable early success, here are five issues that were supposed to have been controversial about the iPad which turned out to be non-issues or at least haven’t negatively impacted sales in a noticeable manner:

Lack of Flash: The theory that the griping about the lack of Flash on the iPad was merely coming from a small number of very loud people appears to have been validated by the iPad’s success.

Second generation syndrome: By now everyone paying attention knows that the second generation of a new Apple product comes with a better feature set and often a better price tag. While some may indeed be waiting for iPad G2 to arrive, it doesn’t appear to be the default behavior of the general public.

Multitasking: Like with Flash, the “public outcry” over the lack of third party multitasking on the iPad appears to have actually been just a handful of folks screaming at the top of their lungs in an attempt to appear more numerous than they actually are. As it turns out, the mainstream users buying the iPad don’t even know what the word “multitasking” means, much less care.

iPad 3G surcharge: Not only does the iPad 3G cost $15 to $30 a month for use of AT&T’s 3G network, users have to pay a $130 surcharge right out of the gate just to get the 3G enabled iPad model. While the 3G iPad pricing scheme feels like a racket, it hasn’t prevented iPad users from seeking out the 3G model – so much so that it’s been more difficult to find at retail than the non-3G model since it launched.

The name “iPad”: Remember how the iPad was going to be scoffed at and flop because its name contained the word “pad”? The early jokes have died down, sales are through the roof, and the joke appears to have been on those who honestly thought that the name “iPad” would somehow harm sales.

Farmville banishment could be boon for iPad sales

FarmVille only exists as a free game because both Zynga, who makes the game, and Facebook who hosts it, make money when users are playing the game. But a dispute between the two parties over who gets to sell the optional pay-for credits which allow users to skip ahead in gameplay could see a parting of ways in which FarmVille becomes removed from Facebook and instead exists on its own website. Such a move would likely harm both parties greatly, as Facebook members whose ties to FarmVille are more Facebook-related than FarmVille-related would likely give the game up altogether, while the game’s more fervent participants would follow it to the new site and would slash their time on Facebook in the process. The move would effectively put a huge dent in the popularity of what at this point is the single most popular Flash-based entity on the internet – which could be a boon for iPad sales.

While Apple sold more than a million iPads in its first month and is now literally selling every iPad it can manufacture to the point that customers are now backordering the device, the segment of potential iPad users addicted to games like FarmVille have likely held off on buying the device until FarmVille and similar games move to a more modern technology than lazy outdated Flash. But while the group isn’t nearly as large as Flash own Adobe wishes it was, FarmVille’s separation from Facebook would mean two things: first, it would cause a significant downshift in browser-based FarmVille gameplay for the reasons stated above, and it would also likely give rise to App Store based versions of the game. The dropoff in gameplay would necessitate that Zynga find new ways to reach users, and the removal of Facebook from the equation would eliminate any reason for Zynga to keep FarmVille tied to a web browser. The in-game purchases within FarmVille are seemingly a perfect fit for the in-app purchases that Apple already allows for within App Store apps, meaning that the whole thing could work out nicely for everyone involved – except for Facebook which would lose a revenue source and a ton of pageviews, and Adobe, which would see one more nail hammered into Flash’s coffin.

Adobe aims to commit suicide with Flash advertising campaign

Flash has apparently become the rock against which Adobe is intent on breaking itself, as the company is now gearing up to put an ever-increasing number of chips down on the outdated technology even as public sentiment has turned away from it. After Apple CEO Steve Jobs effectively ended the debate with his “Thoughts on Flash” letter some observers might have expected Adobe to cut its losses with Flash, which it only acquired incidentally when it bought out Macromedia to get its hands on Dreamweaver, in favor of putting its focus back on the tenable components of its Creative Suite such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. But instead the company is not only firing off an open letter of its own (fair enough, although claiming that Adobe is a leader in “open” markets is a flat out lie) but also launching an online advertising campaign which will only serve to sink more of Adobe’s resources into a battle which everyone not running Adobe has known for some time that the company can’t win. Furthermore, the advertising campaign is based on the same flat-out lie in which the company purports its proprietary Flash technology as instead somehow being some kind of open source standard.

The language of the online campaign, which aims to paint rival Apple as being “closed,” is a sentiment about Apple that no one but geeks considers to be the case; consumers have flocked to Apple’s ecosystems over the past decade due to the coherence of the experience without worrying about any arguments about “open vs closed” which have only ever existed in theory. Thus the campaign appears aimed not at the mainstream but instead at the geek developers who are still using Flash because it’s what they’ve been using since they were in the eighth grade. Either that or Adobe is just as confused about how the mainstream views technology as those bubble-bound geeks are.

Either way, Adobe’s efforts to keep developers in the Flash fold are unlikely to succeed, as developers are now flocking to Apple’s App Store which is increasingly being viewed as the software distribution model of the future. And while Adobe’s balance sheet suggests that a misguided banner ad campaign won’t bankrupt the company’s budget, Adobe’s continued insistence on looking looking outdated and foolish in public over Flash has already taken its toll on the company’s reputation and (fairly or not) begun to paint all of the company’s other products as being outdated as well.

Apple to replace Flash with its own in house solution?

Few beyond the fanatics have attempted to argue that Flash is anything other than an aging technology that should be replaced by something modern, but those playing devil’s advocate in the Apple-Adobe argument have often pointed out that while Flash is ancient, some of the tools set to replace it like HTML5 are still in their infancy (although the fanatics’ claims that the heavily-used HTML5 “doesn’t exist yet” are on the extreme side). Nonetheless, it turns out Apple has a very definitive answer to those skeptics, if a new report is to be believed.

The new technology code named “Gianduia” (we’re assuming Apple is savvy enough not to actually market the technology under that name) is said to take elements of Apple’s own Cocoa and WebObjects technologies, combined with Sun’s JavaScript, and roll them into a browser-based technology. Apple has in fact already been using its Gianduia technology in house to create widgets such as its iPhone online reservation system, but will apparently now be targeted as an official twenty-first century replacement for Flash for all developers. This mirrors another existing Apple product, Keynote, which is now widely available for sale to customers but was originally developed in house for Steve Jobs’ own keynote presentations due to his own desire to use something more sophisticated than PowerPoint.

While those arguing that Apple is merely disallowing Flash from its iPhone and iPad devices for competitive purposes will likely use this new information to add fuel to their fire, the more rational interpretation is that the company is willing to put its money where its mouth is in terms of giving developers an obviously superior option to replace Flash as their development tool of choice.

Google: Flash is dead, slow, dying, and cilantro

While the results can be gamed just as easily as anything else, a quick look at Google’s search suggestions can give you some idea of how the public feels about a particular topic. Often the results are mixed; type in the name of any famous politician followed by the word “is” and you’ll get an immediate glimpse of the divided opinions out there. But with all the hubbub this past month about Flash, the aging development platform that Apple doesn’t want dragging down its platform, while geeks come out of the woodwork to claim their worship of Flash as part of their continued anti-Apple meltdowns, it seemed a good time to take a gather at what the general public really thinks of Flash. Nothing scientific, just a gather mind you, by typing “flash is” into the Google search bar just to see what the search engine would offer up in terms of possible suggestions. Let’s just say there’s a wee bit more of a public consensus when it comes to Flash than when it comes to politicians:

So while Google (the company) hasn’t made any statements about what it thinks of the future prospects for the late nineties software, Google (the search engine) paints a pretty clear picture: Flash is dead, slow, dying, choppy, on its way out, buggy, cilantro…

Wait a minute, cilantro? Okay, so you can credit the good folks at MacBreak Weekly for that last one. But aside from that one comical popular suggestion, the rest of the above list makes it fairly clear where the public stands on the issue. So even as Adobe finds support from the geekdom for its continued push for Geocities Flash to stick around a bit longer, the general public sure seems to disagree.

Antitrust probe of Apple would be anti-consumer

There’s no way of knowing for now whether it’s legitimately true information or just a sore loser at Adobe trying to stir up trouble, but nonetheless there’s a source out there claiming that the Department of Justice is about to open an antitrust investigation into Apple’s refusal to allow crap Flash onto the iPhone/iPad platform or into the App Store. If you’ll forgive the histrionics, this is quite possibly the stupidest bit of nonsense I’ve ever heard, and it had sure better not be true. Antitrust investigations into technology corporations are always dicey because you’re trusting that the government is going to be able to sufficiently understand the technology involved such that they’ll be able to make a competent judgment – and if indeed the DOJ is probing into the Flash situation, then it would strongly suggest right off the bat that there’s no competence involved in the matter.

The DOJ has gotten it right in the past, such as the late nineties probe into Microsoft’s sabotaging of its own operating system to make it nearly impossible to install Netscape Navigator on a Windows computer, which it found to be an abuse of Microsoft’s Windows monopoly. And while the DOJ’s guilty verdict was inexplicably never accompanied by any action against Microsoft, at least they got it right in spirit. In contrast, however, Apple’s refusal to allow apps developed in Adobe’s Flash environment (which are substandard by definition) into Apple’s App Store is fair game in several obvious ways. First of all, where’s the monopoly? Despite its popularity, the iPhone still has a relatively small percentage of the cellphone market. And the iPad has existed for a month. But more importantly, Apple has done nothing to prevent Adobe from being able to get apps into the App Store. In fact, the existence of several apps from Adobe itself, including the free mobile Photoshop app, is plain-as-day proof that Apple isn’t out to get Adobe or to ban it from the App Store; the company just doesn’t want apps on its platform that are being held back by weak outdated developer tools. For Adobe to complain about the matter at all is as ridiculous as a hard drive maker whining that their product isn’t included in each iPhone because it’s not as small and light as solid state memory. And for Adobe to go running to the government, if indeed that’s the case, is beyond asinine.

Antitrust laws play a key role in protecting us from the amorality of massive corporations when that amorality serves to harm consumers, But Apple is to be applauded for taking a stand in protecting its userbase from getting saddled with the twentieth century crap known as Flash, even though allowing such crap apps to be included would resulting in Apple making a little more revenue in the short term. In fact, seeing as how the App Store is platform in which tens of thousands of different developers actively participate, Adobe (or the DOJ) referring to it as “anticompetitive” is every bit as asinine as those geeks who inexplicably refer to the App Store as somehow being a “closed” platform.

In a one month span, Adobe has gone from a respectable maker of professional tools who had no relevance to consumers one way or the other, to a laughingstock that thinks Flash has a future, to now being (if the DOJ nonsense really is true) an insipid pain in the ass intent on harming consumers by taking every ridiculous step possible to try to foist twentieth century garbage on us. Last week I predicted that Flash would become the rock that Adobe would break itself against, and some thought I was overreacting. Now that the idiots have apparently gone running to the government in an attempt to get Flash legally forced upon us, it’s looking more like Adobe’s days of relevance are numbered. Certainly the company’s sanity is gone already.

Keep bashing Flash

We’ve made other outdated technology disappear simply by not engaging in it. We walked away from Geocities years ago, and sure enough, it went by the wayside. More recently we began walking away from MySpace in favor of more modern options, and sure enough, critical mass is flowing away from the old abandoned amusement park by the day. We’re increasingly casting junky flip-phones aside in favor of smartphones like the iPhone, and no one can stop us. And PC users who’ve grown tired of their platform are free to switch over to the Mac any time they wish. So why is that we, the computing public, despite all knowing that Flash is outdated junk leftover from that Geocities era, can’t do anything to get rid of it?

The answer lies in the fact that we don’t control the web; we only think we do. Decisions about what the world’s internet users get to see when they sit down in front of their computers each morning are made by a startlingly small number of developers and webmasters and publishers – and many of them could care less about the quality of the user experience so long as the hits keep coming. Lest we be hypocritical here, while none of our actual content comes in the form of absurdly outdated Flash content, when a misguided advertiser absolutely insists on running a Flash ad, it’s not exactly easy to say no (although we have finally drawn the line on that matter). Nor is it easy for non-technical publishers to say no to their own entrenched developers when those developers insist on clinging to outdated tools that they happen to feel personally comfortable with instead of giving the audience something more palatable to consume.

And yet we, as the internet using public, generally fail to even try to do anything about it. While we might stop visiting a website that’s too embarrassingly laden with Flash, we’re unlikely to inform the webmaster of why we’ve stopped visiting. When fun free games like Farmville surface and they’re only available in a crap format like Flash, we dive in and play the game anyway, despite the awful looking graphics, despite the glitches, despite the overwhelming amount of processing power that gets gobbled up by it – even though the animation, which looks like a third grader drew it, feels like it shouldn’t be processor intensive at all.

But while Apple has done us the favor of forcing Flash off the iPad and iPhone platforms so that their respective development environments can be forced into the present, that doesn’t change the fact that the ancient technology is still holding back both the Mac and Windows computing platforms. And as long as we continue to allow Flash to be shoved at us on our computers without complaint, that won’t change nearly as quickly as it should. While an outright boycott of websites that use Flash might be too much to ask of the internet using public, a much easier strategy involves simply embarrassing webmasters into being afraid to use the technology for fear of looking like buffoons in front of their bosses. And so even as yet another disconnected geek tech publication has declared today in a headline that we should “Stop bashing Flash,” we’re encouraging you to do just the opposite: Keep bashing Flash. Bash it long, bash it hard, bash it proud. Write into webmasters and tell them to get that crap off their site. Keep talking about how lame Flash is any time it comes up in conversation; you never know what kind of influence you might have on the person who brought up the topic, particularly if that person turns out to be a webmaster or to have influence over one. Maybe even Adobe will see the light and cease betting its future on a hand it can’t win.

The more you bash Flash, the sooner it’ll be replaced by something modern, and the sooner you won’t have to put up with seeing it or using it.

Apple vs Adobe: paradise lost in a generation

Adobe’s inexplicable decision to push forward with this aging Flash platform it acquired almost by accident when it bought out Macromedia to get its hands on Dreamweaver, along with Apple’s typically hard-nosed response to any company attempting to inject second rate crap onto one of its own platforms, have combined to create a rather loud dust-up between two technology companies which a generation ago were on the same page – literally. If Apple’s then-new Macintosh platform and Adobe’s then-new digital document creation software hadn’t found each other when they did, the desktop publishing revolution might not have happened. So to see the two companies taking public pot shots at each other, even at a time when roughly half of Adobe’s revenue comes from sales of its Mac software products, is fairly startling, particularly when one considers that Apple’s current Adobe-dissing boss in 2010 is the same Adobe-lobing boss the company had back in 1984. The difference, of course, lies in the fact that a generation ago Adobe was looking to get ahead-of-its-time software onto a burgeoning new Apple platform, while at present the software that Adobe is attempting to get onto yet another burgeoning new Apple platform just happens to be software that Steve Jobs thinks should have died a generation ago.

Pro-Flash arguments too often come from Flash developers

I’ve been as anti-Flash as anyone over the years, and that goes back to long before Apple decided that the Adobe technology was ready for the scrap heap by declining to allow its implementation on the iPhone or iPad. In fact I distinctly recall seeing Flash in action on my computer for the first time, in what must have been a decade ago, and musing that it was an impressive cheat, but a cheat nonetheless. It was seemingly designed to get around the limitations of the day – lack of processing power, lack of bandwidth, lack of something – and I never really understood the details because I was anything but an engineer or developer (one programming class in college demonstrated that for me, and one subsequent circuitry class had me running for the hills). But Flash always seemed like a temporary cheat to my untrained eye, transitional technology of some kind, and so when Apple finally decided in 2007 that Flash was done for if the company had anything to say about it, my only response was a relieved “It’s about time.”

But that sentiment has gotten me in trouble on geek hangouts like Twitter (I’ve been using the service since back when most of its users were geeks, and so to this day much of my follower base on there consists of them) when I’ve used tweets as a means to lash out at Flash or make fun of it for being left over from the geocities era. Invariably, someone always comes flying back at me in defense of Flash, whether it’s on Twitter, or on Facebook, or in the comments section here, and while that defense of Flash is always clearly coming from a minority of the people reading what I’ve had to say about it, it’s generally been passionate defense to the opine that you’d think I’d insulted their child. And in an enlightening number of those cases, it turned that I had pretty much done just that; the person defending Flash to vigorously was in fact a Flash developer. Not an Adobe employee, mind you, and not always someone who only developed in Flash, either. But, and I wish I’d kept a better headcount over the past few months, I’ve observed that the biggest Flash defenders are almost invariably those whose income is at least partially dependent on continued Flash adoption.

I’m not saying Flash developers have been the only people to step up and defend the outdates technology. But I’ve even found that some people positioning themselves as tech journalists have also turned out to be Flash developers when they’re not doing the journalism thing (and again, I wish I’d kept documentation of this). So while you’ll have to take my word for it (or not, as the case may be), suffice it to say that the next time you hear someone defending Flash as if their life depended on it, it’s entirely possible that that might turn out to literally be the case, at least in a professional sense.

Adobe erases 0.01% of iPhone userbase in Flash revenge ploy

Those wondering how Adobe plans to fight back now that Apple has not only banned the company’s ancient Flash technology from the iPhone and iPad, but also publicly embarrassed Adobe this week with a public opus from Steve Jobs in which he explains paragraph by painful paragraph why Flash should never have rightly survived the geocities era, now have their answer: Adobe’s secret to revenge against Apple will come in the form of costing Apple about eight thousand iPhone sales.

That’s right, Adobe intends to cripple the entire iPhone platform, which at last count includes more than fifty million units sold, by denying iPhones to its own employees. Instead, Adobe’s team will be forced to use Google’s open source Android platform, the mobile equivalent of Linux, for their daily mobile phone usage. Is it because Adobe still plans to bankrupt itself by putting all its chips down on a Flash battle it can’t win, and therefore wants to ensure that its employees each have a phone that can run Flash – even if it’s a phone that doesn’t allow for much else to be accomplished beyond the usual geek wanking associated with the Android platform? Or are Adobe’s higher ups so pissed at Steve Jobs over his “Thoughts on Flash” that they’re now looking to throw any dagger at Apple they can, even if it includes something as non-impactfully symbolic as disallowing its own employees from having iPhones?

Frankly, with Flash being obviously done for (you’ve known that for the better part of a decade if you’ve been paying attention), the whole “why isn’t there Flash on my iPad?” story is growing a little boring. The more interesting question at this point might be more along the following: once Adobe is finished inexplicably ruining itself by betting its future on Flash, which technology company is going to end up with the company’s legitimate Creative Suite properties like Photoshop and Illustrator?

Apple announces real iPhone 4G will also cost $5,000

In a surprise move, Apple announced today that the actual iPhone 4G will also cost $5,000 per unit. “We were originally planning to stick with our $99 to $299 scale,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in an open letter entitled Thoughts on Pricing. “But the guys at Gizmodo went ahead and set the market price. If you don’t like paying five grand to upgrade to the new iPhone, you can blame those guys.” Jobs went on to say that the move will “teach them a lesson” about messing with Apple’s intellectual property, as everyone who has to pay the $5,000 will invariably blame Gizmodo for it, thus causing the gadget blog great distress. Jobs then put on a red bandana and inexplicably began referring to himself as “Prison Mike.”

The move comes on the same day in which Jobs released another open letter, entitled Thoughts on Flash, in which the Apple boss detailed his reasons for not wanting the Adobe technology on his platform. In unrelated news, the house of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen was mysteriously raided today by local police.

In other news, Apple announced today that the shipping date for the iPhone 4G has been delayed due to higher than expected pre-orders for the $5,000 device.

[/satire]

Steve Jobs posts “Thoughts on Flash” on Apple.com

Apple’s longstanding efforts to keep Adobe’s Flash technology off its iPhone and iPad platforms has come to a public head today, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has posted a “Thoughts on Flash” article on Apple.com. Such postings from Jobs are rare and tend to have significant impact; his previous “Thoughts on Music” post essentially brought an end to DRM in digital music. In Jobs’ open blog post, he emphasized the fact that “Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary” and then went on to discuss Flash’s security and reliability issues along with its negative impact on battery life. But then he gets to meat of the problem: Flash limits developers to the kinds of technology that can work on various platforms, including ones that are significantly behind the iPad and iPhone, thus limiting the innovation in the resulting apps. Or, as he puts it:

“Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.”
It’s a long letter from Jobs, and it obviously doesn’t include Adobe’s opinions on the matter, but it’s well worth a read nonetheless – and may well serve as the final nail in the Flash coffin.

Apple succeeds in eradicating Flash, thankfully

Apple doesn’t mess around when it comes to outdated technology. We’ve seen it play out for the past twelve years, going all the way to when the company made the then-controversial move of not including a built-in floppy drive with the original iMac. Amongst geek tech pundits (and there are no non-geek tech pundits), the lack of a floppy drive was the topic of conversation leading up to the product’s launch: Would it kill the iMac’s chances right out of the gate? Was recently reinstated head honcho Steve Jobs just being an egomaniac? Did Apple have a personal agenda against companies that made floppy drives? In fact, the geek tech conversation of 1998 was the fact that the iMac didn’t have a floppy drive. Of course the whole thing seems ridiculous in hindsight; the floppy was ancient technology at the time, a format with a capacity of just over one megabyte which had been designed at a time when the largest computer files were word processing documents and even software installers were often less than a megabyte in size; the rise of digital photography and digital music in the late nineties meant that the floppy disk was already irrelevant before Apple pulled the plug. And sure enough, within a couple years floppy drives had been eradicated from most Windows PCs as well.

And yet even with the lesson learned so long ago, and repeated in various other ways during the twelve years in between, we’re now seeing the exact same thing play out here in 2010 with the iPad. All any tech pundit can seem to talk about is the lack of Flash, a software development tool which had its heyday in the geocities era, back when the biggest question of the day was whether to decorate your webpage with a Flash animation or an animated GIF, a quaint leftover remnant from when the internet was still a feeble-yet-fun toy. And yet for some reason, we’re still stuck with Flash, even years after Flash maker Macromedia ceased to exist as an independent company. Adobe swallowed Macromedia just to get its hands on Dreamweaver, which had been roundly beating Adobe’s own web design software in terms of marketshare. But instead of Adobe seeing Flash for the garage sale throw-in that it was, the company decided to bet its reputation on Flash of all things as a development tool for the future. There’s really no explanation for this – other than the notion that Adobe really doesn’t want things to change.

Thankfully, Apple once again decided to take a stand. The processor hogging, battery hogging bloatware known as Flash would have no place on the iPhone – and hardly anyone even noticed. Then, in what should have been a surprise to absolutely no one, Flash was also not supported on the iPad, and yet for some reason tech pundits decided that this was suddenly a massive issue – and by virtue of running their mouths about it nonstop, have managed to turn it into a controversy (inside the tech beltway at least). So now it’s all we hear about, when it’s currently one of the less relevant aspects of the iPad platform, and will make those who bemoaned its absence look absurdly foolish in hindsight.

But as for the staredown between the two companies, you knew someone was going to blink eventually, and you knew it was going to be Adobe, and you knew the world was going to keep spinning on its axis even after Adobe announced this week that it was killing off any hope of Flash development on the iPad or iPhone. Thank God. There are hundreds of thousands of apps available for the iPlatform, all of which run well, and none of which include even a little bit of that ancient scourge known as Flash – and now we know that none of them ever will.

So yeah, there are a few folks out there who won’t be able to play Farmville on their iPad until the developers of that particular product wake up and move to real development environment. But in the long run, the entire iPad platform – and its users – will be better off for the fact that Flash has been eradicated from the products of the future. Why Adobe insisted on clinging to a long-dead red headed stepchild for this long is anyone’s guess.

Flash for iPad and iPhone is officially dead

In an apparent victory for Apple, software maker Adobe has officially given up on its attempts to bring its Flash technology to the iPhone and iPod platform. The software, which had its internet heyday in the late 1990′s but it considered by many to be outdated bloatware at this point, was actively being kept off of the iPlatform by Apple due to the Mac maker’s concern over the performance of the software of the devices. Apple instead favors HTML 5, the next generation standard for internet development, a platform which is expected to see a boost from the move as third party developers get word today that Flash content will officially never be consumable on any of Apple’s mobile products (Flash does run at full capacity on all of Apple’s Macintosh computer models).

While Adobe has long claimed that the inability to employ Flash in App Store apps represented a blow to competition, fairness, truth, justice, and the American way (some of those we threw in just to see if you were paying attention), Apple has countered with the fact that HTML5 and other twenty-first century technologies are open standards, while the aging Flash is a proprietary platform.

We here at Beatweek have heard arguments for both sides of this, but it’s worth pointing out that most of those who’ve griped to us about the lack of Flash on the iPad and iPhone have turned out to be Flash developers themselves. It’s reasonable to assume that now that the matter has been officially settled, developers who’d been clinging to Flash will now finally let go and embrace more modern technologies, ultimately benefiting consumers in the process. That having been said, with this news, we wouldn’t want to be Flash developers today.

Crystal Bowersox’s “People Get Ready” on YouTube already

If you missed the powerful rendition of the classic “People Get Ready” on American Idol tonight by a guitarless Crystal Bowersox, or if you want to see it again – or if you’re on the west coast and you just can’t wait another hour – a video of the two minute performance is on YouTube already. Suffice it to say that it’s not an official upload, so you might want to hurry before it goes poof. Typically speaking, it’ll be available for purchase in iTunes soon enough anyway, but again, if you can’t wait that long, don’t let us get in your way. But before you go, here’s the scoop on her performance.

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