This is more a stream of consciousness piece than a well-developed thesis. I’ve had these thoughts thundering around upstairs and needed to get rid of them.
I really like Apple and their products. The MacBook Pro saved me from Vista, and I haven’t looked back. The iPhone is a great piece of technology. I would really want an iPad if I didn’t have a Kindle already. I have to say I’m really disappointed by all of this Flash and Apple nonsense. I’m also happy to read that some other people are disappointed by this (Gizmodo, Digital Beat, MacRumors Forum, FucktheIpad).
Some of Apple’s justification for the lack of Flash, namely performance issues, seems to fall a little flat here. Supposedly by designing the chip themselves, Apple has a chip that can render webpages instantly and still play video for 10 hours. It would appear that performance isn’t really the issue with the iPad.
That being said I have never really understood the whole Flash-performs-poorly-on-Mac thing. I work for Adobe. I am a member of the Flash Platform evangelism team. I use multiple Flash applications, every day of my life, for hours on end. I don’t have browser crashing issues. I currently use Chrome, and used Firefox before that. I never really gelled with Safari. I’m not being obtuse here, or acting, I just don’t have those particular problems. I’m not running a special version of Flash Player either; I just use the latest released version.
I also don’t understand cognitive gymnastics it takes to hate Flash because it’s proprietary and love the fact that Apple is batting us around by designing systems that block it by way of preventing one from installing it through a proprietary gatekeeper.
Flash is proprietary. It’s also free, widely distributed, rapidly brought up to date on user’s computers, and cross platform. Yes, to some degree you have to depend on Adobe. This is true. Even worse, we get something out of it–we sell authoring tools, content creation tools, services, and servers that target that dependency.
With HTML 5 you don’t have to depend on anyone….
Except browser authors: Opera, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. But they all conform to the HTML 5 standard…
Okay, they don’t yet but they all have detailed plans that outline when they will support HTML 5…
No they don’t. But they don’t get anything out of it…
Except access to your data, or locking you into their operating system, or locking you into their operating system and hardware or whatever ideologically pure motivation Mozilla and Opera have these days.
At the end of the day, all of these technologies are driven by mutual self-interest and not by ideology. You have to decide if what you get is worth what you give up.
Personally I don’t like being told what to do. But more important than not liking being told what to do, I enjoy being told how to do it even less. I don’t like opinionated software that promises Do it the way we tell you to, and we’ll make your life better.
- I didn’t like Graffiti.
- I don’t enjoy working with Ruby on Rails.
- I don’t like the Apple Mobile device’s increasing demand that I work the way they want me to.
At the end of the day, despite the fact that they may not be well expressed or even coherent, I have more faith in my opinions than my software’s opinions.
tpryan.blog 