TextMate + CSSEdit pretty much ensure that I’ll stay on OS X for the foreseeable future even if 50% of my time is spent on the command line.

It seems so precious and 17th Century guild-like to have to be handcrafting HTML, even if it’s for templates that can represent 100,000 different pieces of content. I’d love to believe a tool could be written that could produce reasonable code, reasonably cleanly.

~e

Flash was the only reasonable, cross-browser, cross-platform way to accomplish a host of interesting interactive things. You could devote your life to JavaScript in, like 2002, and create sites that would work in varying ways everywhere, or buy into the Adobe view, and build Flash presentations that worked generally well, generally everywhere. That was pretty powerful.

I still see Flash as having a distinct role, but it’s no longer critical. There will be a long, long period in which Flash is vital–maybe as long as 10 years–during which many kinds of things that we relied on Flash for will be summoned up through open Web standards supported in the majority of updated browsers. In five years, maybe less, nearly everyone with a robust Internet connection will be running a browser that’s capable of the latest and greatest.

At that point, we’ll see an inflection. By then, I hope Adobe has developed super-killer transition tools, to let its Flash developers produce content that can be read in many different ways, and deployed in the best way for the given user experience.

I keep wondering why Adobe isn’t talking about HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, and so forth. It will support all that. It should be talking about it now. Except that might undermine its short-time, rearguard effort to protect Flash revenue and hegemony.

They haven’t released the crash data, and I doubt Apple ever will. However, in my own experience, and in anecdotes that many of Mac using colleagues have shared with me, I can attest that many of the issues I’ve had with OS X have been related to the playback of Flash content. I’ve only experienced 3 Kernel Panics since owning a mac. 2 of them were caused by Flash.

Adobe and Apple have a long and rocky history, and while some of their position against Flash is definitely rooted in these emotions, I’ve been Anti-Flash since 1996 and have recommended against using the technology for ANYTHING, save for video. Now that HTML5 is right around the corner, I won’t even have to recommend Flash for that task either. This is not a new position, and if you think that this position has been adopted by otherwise smart web developers just because Uncle Steve said so is to also say you’ve had your head in the sand and are willfully ignorant of the Web Standards movement who has rallied against the use of Flash and other browser plugin based “innovations” for many many years.

I appreciate your comment, and thank you for participating in this conversation. Apple is by no means “right” about everything, but that doesn’t make his points against Flash any less true. The real debate, for me, is which video codec we should be using for , since H.264 is an Open Standard that is sadly patent-encumbered. Personally I’m rooting for Google’s VP8 codec, but the widespread deployment of H.264 hardware decoders is a key component of why its being seriously considered over Ogg Theora or other less patent-encumbered technologies.

As for the section 3.3.1 changes, I may not like it, and it flies in the face of many of my own personal convictions, but if you want to play on that playground there are rules to follow. Then again, most of the Apps I have (except for the games) could easily have been created in HTML/CSS/JS and deployed via Mobile Safari, and while Flash isn’t invited to that party either, it still gives plenty of freedom to get your content on to the iDevices. But you do yourself a disservice by claiming that the SDK costs money. The $99 Developer Tax only kicks in if you want to deploy to the App Store. You can obtain and develop with the iPhone OS SDK for free and even deploy your apps, albeit in a limited fashion, without ever paying Apple for the privilege. FUD from either side of the debate does not forward the conversation one bit. I can separate my principles from the practical application of those principles, and while I will continue to fight for MORE open standards, the adoption of those standards takes a lot more than just wishing it so.

~e

Flash has issues, of course it does, and personally I’ve not bought a Flash upgrade since Version5 and have no intention of doing so. But Steve Jobs is using percieved issues with the flash player to mask a few things.

The flash player not being on the iPhone/Pad/Touch must be a blow to Adobe, but thats not where the problem here has arisen.

The issue at hand, is to do with the new licensing restrictions placed on HOW we developers create applications on the iPhone/Pad/Touch. We can only code an iPhone app if we buy an SDK from Apple. We can only use that SDK on the latest version of Apple’s Operating System. And now we can only use Apple approved programs to write the code. That is some crazy crazy crazy amount of restrictions. And Steve Jobs has the cheek to talk about “proprietary” software?

In honesty, if Microsoft did that can you imagine the uproar? Infact, if any company other than Apple, which have become masters at controlling their bad PR moves, had pulled this stunt, what would the reaction have been?

I notice that Steve Jobs, nor anyone from Apple actually, have ever released any data to back up their claims about Flash being the number 1 cause of (insert excuse here), or infact any of their other claims. Its not that I doubt these claims at all, I’m quite ambivolent to them and wouldn’t be surprised if they were true; its just funny how they suddenly came out of the woodwork as soon as Adobe made it easier for people to make applications for the iPhone/Pad/Touch.

We’ve had iPhone/Touches for 2.5 years now; where were these claims about Flash evil in all that time? Oh thats right, there weren’t any. Or if they existed, then they were under a file called “How to create a smokescreen…”

Kev

Just get it off my web & take Dreamweaver with you.