Living the Dream

By now you've likely heard loads of coverage about the Apple iPad, and it's positioning in the market as (depending on who you believe) a natural progression of the netbook, or a heretofore nonexistent class of device that is poised to usher in the new era of appliance based computing.

You may have also heard about a few of the shortcomings of the device in it's current form. One of these shortcomings, multitasking, I believe Apple knows has to be addressed in both the iPad and the iPhone. As both devices continue to evolve, I would expect this capability to be pushed out to users with a new generation of hardware.

The other shortcoming that nearly every list includes is the lack of Flash support in the browser. Here, I don't think there's any chance that Apple will ever turn around. They've drawn their line in the sand, and as the initial shock of not having support for such a core web component has worn off, much of the argument for Flash being a core web component has started to lose momentum.

Adobe Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow published a now infamous blog post about the iPad's lack of Flash support that prompted Wired to declare that Adobe had resorted to "playing the porn card" in an effort to put pressure on Apple to revisit their decision.

It's worth noting that Lee has since updated the original post to include the disclaimer that the blog post was his own, and not an official "Adobe" blog.   I would imagine that this update itself was prompted by Lee's own desire for self preservation within Adobe.   Having been a member of the Adobe team for 8 years myself, I can assure you it's not a freewheeling corporate culture.

All this aside, the real issue in play is the continued relevance of Flash on the web, particularly in an HTML5 world, and the desire that Apple has to maintain strict control of their ecosystem.    Let's look at these two issues independently for a few minutes.

Where does Flash fit?

You can remember a time, I'm sure, when the temptation existed to develop content in Flash for the web because it allowed you to eliminate inconsistencies in behavior and display caused by lack of adherence to standards by the major browser vendors.   Like them or not, Microsoft was always the worst offender in this area, choosing to attempt to define their own standards and attempt to "lock in" users once they were hooked.   It's smart business – but horrible for the overall well being of the web.    That's not Microsoft's fault – but rather it's the fault of their customers (corporate customers in particular) who allowed themselves to be sold solutions that offered no vendor independence.    This is the very reason why IE6 still continues to exist today.    There are too many legacy systems deployed in large corporate environments where it's simply not cost effective to migrate away from these non standard solutions.

Now, though, even Microsoft is trying to encourage their customers to move toward standards based technologies and away from IE6.    The continued support of this legacy technology has started to burden the company that once championed it, and it's no longer good business to ignore that there are better solutions available.

Instead, now it's Adobe who is in the position of trying to keep users locked in to a proprietary solution for something that can more easily and effectively be done via video encoding/embedding standards available to any browser that wants to adhere to them.    All without the need of a separate plugin, within the browser itself.     Make no mistake that Adobe sees this as a huge threat to the dominance that Flash has enjoyed in the "video on the web" space for so long, at a time when "video on the web as a replacement for traditional content" as a concept is really just starting to click for the average user.    

Where Adobe has leverage with Flash is (in my opinion) the desktop application space.   Adobe AIR   is a fabulous technology that, through the use of Flash, allows developers to build desktop class applications for deployment across multiple systems, eliminating the need to worry about what client OS is being used.   There is a tremendous built in development community who have spent years developing Flash applications for the web, and there is already solid user familiarity with the technology.    The transition makes sense, and it's one that Adobe would be wise to embrace, and put more marketing muscle behind pushing.    

Apple's Role

For Apple, the motivation behind ignoring Flash on these devices has little to do with being so magnanimous as wanting to champion open standards video on the web.    For Apple, it's the sheer terror of allowing that very same application style development that I just mentioned in to their very closed iPhone/iPad ecosystem.    If you've seen the quality of HTML5 based web applications in mobile safari (see the recently launched Google Voice app as a great example) then you know that Apple already has their hands full fighting off an App Store threat that is going to continue to grow as developers tire of the restrictiveness of the App Store submission process.    Add to this the potential of increasing that rouge developer base AND providing access to essentially an already built app catalog via Flash and it's easy to see that there's no way it's ever coming to either device.

Where do they go from here?

For Adobe, Flash as a source of video on the web will continue to stick around for a while to come.   It has upwards of 80% of the web video market now, and those kinds of huge numbers are unlikely to take a nosedive quickly.    Still, as Robert Scoble himself illustrated, this shot across the Flash bow by Apple has only served to remind content producers that Flash simply isn't the only game in town (nor even the best game in town) anymore.    Adobe would be wise to start thinking long term about where the platform is headed.    Most technologists would agree that eventually (there would be disagreement on timing, but eventually) the idea of requiring a plugin to play video from your site/source is going to have to go away.    Take video away from Flash, and Flash is still an awesome product – it just needs to be repositioned/reframed to developers.

For Apple, the very real threat of HTML5 is probably going to be a much bigger nightmare for them than the thought of Flash apps running on their devices ever would have been.    Now is the time to start considering opening up the iPhone SDK and removing some of the silly limitations that sandbox apps in and prevent them from doing things like running in the background, so as to offer a compelling reason to developers to want to develop natively for the device.     Eventually, they'll have no choice but to do this if they want to keep that App Store gravy train running.

Ok Adobe friends, tear me apart.    Cheers.

I am posting this mostly to test the Wordpress iPhone app. I’ve been looking for a good mobile blogging solution that didn’t involve sending an email, and so far this app seems to work as advertised.

Though not as feature rich as composing from a browser, it does everything you’d likely want to do from your phone, including support for posting photos from your phones picture library.

The photo below is a little finger painting that Sydney made on the phone using a freeware sketch app. Very cool.