Apple's Thoughts on Flash

April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

There’s a very interesting article up on Apple’s site from Steve Jobs himself discussing the decision to keep Flash off Apple iPhones and iPads.  I thought I’d select a couple of the most interesting:

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

In addition to the above, there’s also video which: decoding video to display on a computer screen using software requires a lot of the CPU (and kills battery life), while using a hardware-based encoding (H.264) is much more efficient.  Flash didn’t support H.264 until very recently.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

One of the most intriguing points Jobs makes is the concept of being beholden to a third-party to make updates to their libraries whenever Apple introduces a new technology.  With the speed of changes in the iPhone OS, I can see his point.

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

via Thoughts on Flash.

Filed Under: Apple, Emerging IT

From Gmail to MobileMe

September 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

When I purchased an iPhone 3G (upgrading from the first gen), I also purchased the companion MobileMe service, and I’ve been giving it a test run since.  At the time, I was hoping for a replacement to Google’s Gmail, but unfortunately, it’s not quite there yet.  I thought I’d take a few minutes to offer some tips to the MobileMe Email team, as well as start a discussion on email services in general.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Apple, Emerging IT, Web 2.0

Internet radio as the killer iPhone app

August 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Since Apple launched the App Store for iPhone OS 2.0, I’ve been keeping my eyes out for what might be the next killer app for the iPhone.  I’ve often thought the iPhone would be a game-changer in the mobile environment, allowing people to think of their phones in a new way.  These mobile devices are no longer simply a phone with added-on Internet access, but a complete communications and personal computer system.  With games and other non-communication-oriented apps the iPhone has achieved much towards this end, but there’s one additional category that has the potential to be a game changer in an unexpected way: internet radio.

The Pandora and AOL Radio apps are designed to allow you to stream radio to your iPhone or iPod Touch.  The introduction of fast 3G Internet access on the iPhone represents a significant threat to satellite radio and, to a lesser extent, terrestrial radio.  Consider the implications.  A user has an iPhone that’s the same size as an iPod (or a Sirius Stiletto) that can stream radio while in the car, walking down the street, or inside a building.  The iPhone can hop onto WiFi networks (same with the iPod Touch) or use 3G.  Even Edge connectivity allows for decent streaming.  All that adds up to great wireless access – as good as, or better than, satellite technology, since 3G and Edge connections work indoors whereas satellite doesn’t.

Accessibility aside, the real advantage is the phenomenal flexibility streaming radio provides.  Take Pandora for example.  It’s a streaming radio program for the iPhone that creates a customized radio station matched exactly to your tastes.  But even the simple ability to skip over songs you don’t like, a basic feature of Pandora, is inherently absent from any pre-programmed content station.  Such a simple feature goes a long way to improving your listening experience, and it’s almost embarrassing in the age of TiVo to not be able to skip over content you don’t find interesting.

With greater accessibility and significantly greater flexibility, streaming Internet radio will become one of the biggest threats to satellite radio over the next few years and will become a killer app for the iPhone.  Cell technology is getting better at providing high-speed Internet access, and already there are a number of very good streaming services that match listener’s tastes to music.  As the iPhone becomes increasingly popular among consumers and access speeds increase, satellite will suffer.  Satellite’s only hope to stay competitive is to offer enough exclusive content that listeners won’t be able to part ways with satellite radio without missing their favorite programs, but even that strategy is tenuous at best – it will only be so long before the content creators themselves decide to head for the greener pastures that Internet streaming radio provides.

Filed Under: Apple, Emerging IT Tagged With: , , , ,

Switching to Gmail

December 10, 2007 By 14 Comments

gmailOne of the things I had been meaning to do for some time was to switch all of my email over to my Gmail account. The idea is simple: I have a lot of different email accounts, and it’d be great to keep them all in one place, backed up, and always accessible. So, setting up Gmail to access each of my different email accounts (well, five of the most important, and the rest just forward to my gmail address) was trivial. The hard part, however, was getting all my previous messages into Gmail.

Here’s a quick overview of how to get all of your old emails into Gmail as painlessly as possible (and one way that preserves dates!).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Emerging IT, Web 2.0

Google to Offer Personal File Storage Service

November 28, 2007 By Leave a Comment

I just came across an article from the Wall Street Journal about Google’s plan to offer consumers a service to store their personal data files.  I’m pretty excited about this, and so should you, for several reasons.

First, mass data storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, but to really push prices down, it takes the economies of scale a company like Google or Amazon can get by combining thousands of users’ storage needs into a single service.  Providing a service like this will decrease the total cost per gigabyte to even lower levels, which theoretically could make it cheaper to sign up and pay for a service like this than to go out and buy a hard drive.

Second, Google usually does services right (not always, but usually).  It looks like they have an eye towards consumers, rather than businesses (like Amazon’s S3 service), which will, hopefully, mean good integration with your desktop.  I sincerely hope to see a tightly integrated OS setup where users can treat their Google storage service as “just another hard drive” on their computer.  I’d really rather not see some cumbersome client software you have to download, but rather a network share on your computer.

Third, and most important (to me at least), is the freedom from worrying about backups, redundancy, and scaling.  More and more, I’m watching movies and TV shows on my computer or home entertainment system via iTunes and similar services, and my storage requirements are expanding rapidly.  There will be a time in the very near future where I’ll need a terabyte or multiple terabytes to store my movies and TV shows for access, rather than as DVDs.  And I’m not alone: many people are doing just this, as everything becomes digitized and always available.

Anyway, it’s all still very early to get too excited about this service, but I really hope Google does this one right.  Keep it simple, no client software, cross-platform, and as cheap as possible is the way to win consumers here; and I know that now – and in the future – people’s storage requirements are just going to increase.

Filed Under: Emerging IT

Updating Rubygems in Leopard (Mac OS 10.5)

October 28, 2007 By 2 Comments

After updating my Mac to Leopard (MacOS X 10.5), I noticed I had a couple issues when updating Rubygems. For instance, when running “gem update mongrel_cluster”, I would constantly get build errors. After doing some digging, I found that you need to set ARCHFLAGS to your system type. Here’s how you would update all your rubygems on Leopard:

sudo su
[Enter your password]
bash
export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386"
gem update

Note that you’ll want to change the i386 to the actual architecture you have (my MacBook, for instance, is an Intel processor, while you would want to use “ppc” for non-Intel Macs).

Once I had updated my gems, things started working fine again. For instance, mongrel_cluster was having issues configuring a new project, but after updating the gem using this method, it seemed to be working fine. Hope you find this useful!

Filed Under: Development, Emerging IT

Time for iPhone To-Do Lists!

October 26, 2007 By 1 Comment

I’ve had my iPhone for a few weeks now (and yes, I got my $100 rebate), and I have to say that my biggest gripe is the lack of a good to-do list application. Of course, this is a fairly small gripe in the grand scheme of things (Apple got a lot right with this device), but it’s still important to me. One of the major ways I work on a day-to-day basis is to set lots of small, achievable tasks using my to-do list, then check them off as I get things done.

There are several to-do list iPhone web apps out there (notably, 37signal’s Ta-Da Lists), though it’s just not quite what I’m looking for. I really like the built-in to-do list in iCal, so having an actual iPhone application (not just an app via Safari) that can sync to my pre-existing iCal to-do items would be ideal. Hopefully Apple will be forthcoming with one (especially since it seems to-do items will play a bigger role with the Mail client in Leopard).

Filed Under: Emerging IT

The future of AJAX web applications

September 19, 2007 By Leave a Comment

There’s an interesting opinion up by Joel Spolsky, a software developer and founder of FogCreek Software, about where the direction AJAX-based web applications are headed. He makes an interesting, and I feel very apt, comparison with the olden days of mainframes and Lotus 1-2-3, and the current state of the interactive web. For instance, he likens the idea of sites like Google’s Gmail with Lotus 1-2-3, where the development team spent all of their time writing code and optimizing it for the current day’s limitations, rather than looking ahead and adding new wiz-bang features that would give them their “long-term competitive advantage.”

And I think Joel is completely right. Gmail, for one, has been stagnant for the last three years or so, and haven’t been preparing for the future. Check out this blog article from Lifehacker about a comparison between Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Their conclusion? Yahoo Mail has spent the last two years innovating and adding all sorts of new features, while Gmail has very little improvements (except, perhaps, incrementally increased storage levels).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Development, Emerging IT, Web 2.0

Apple iPhones reduced in price

September 6, 2007 By 2 Comments

iPhoneYesterday, Apple dropped the price on the 8gig iPhone (that killer, must-have gadget that’s apparently been selling like crazy since being introduced), along with new product announcements in their iPod lineup. Unfortunately, it looks like this price break puts a lot of us early adopters in a tight spot: those of us who shelled out the full $600 for the 8gig models are now realizing the price of purchasing early: about $200.

If you’re not already aware, if you bought your iPhone within 10 days of an announced price break, you’re entitled to receive the difference from Apple (provided you claim this within another 14 days of the announcement).

Should Apple reduce its price on any shipped product within 10 calendar days of shipment, you may contact Apple Sales Support at 1-800-676-2775 to request a refund or credit of the difference between the price you were charged and the current selling price. To receive the refund or credit you must contact Apple within 14 business days of shipment.

Sadly, we at Draconis bought out iPhones 16 days before the announcement: 2 days later and we would have qualified for that rebate. But I’m not bitter over it: I love my iPhone, was willing to part with the full price without expecting any kind of rebate, and anyway, these things are out of our control. Anyone else in the same boat as us?

Filed Under: Emerging IT, News

Application development on the iPhone

August 28, 2007 By 1 Comment

Just like every other techie in the world, we recently got our hands on some iPhones.  And, as software developers, our first thoughts were: what can we write for this thing?  Well, as everyone else has already pointed out, you’re pretty much limited to writing web apps for the iPhone only, but this doesn’t impact us as much: we’re doing web apps exclusively at the moment anyway!  I’ve been looking into creating an invotrak app for the iPhone recently, and believe I should have something available in the near future.

Craig Hunter has a good article up on his site that discusses some of the limitations of creating applications for the iPhone, though his standpoint is coming as a traditional Mac developer (and he makes great points: it doesn’t make any sense for a user to connect to a web app to input to-do list items):

Business aspects aside, the main issue I see as a traditional developer is that iPhone web app development is still very limited. Outside of some viewport settings, a couple special link types (really only the “tel:” link is new), and some new “-webkit” style attributes, there is little about making iPhone-specific web apps that differs from generic web apps. And that’s possibly the most disappointing aspect of all from my standpoint. Apple’s announcement states that “developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone”, but that’s not the case.

I believe there’s a lot that can still be done with the tools we’re given, and I look forward to Apple creating more tools in the future.

Filed Under: Development, Emerging IT, Web 2.0
« Older Posts