MattMaroon.com

Steve Jobs published a note called Thoughts on Flash today, almost certainly as a direct result of my previous post, HTML 5: Not any Time Soon, in which I pointed out that I think Apple is making a mistake by not supporting Flash on the iPhone and iPad.

Steve’s rebuttal contained a few points. Number one is that Flash isn’t open, it’s a proprietary standard (obviously true) and that for some reason Apple has decided that while everything else they produce should be a proprietary standard, web-based ones need to be open. It’s a double-standard with no clear reason as to why that one proprietary works everywhere but there, but it is what it is.

Ironically he then goes on to tout the performance benefits of using h.264, a proprietary video encoding standard that Apple relies on heavily. You can argue the finer points of video compression (whether Ogg Theora is sufficiently high quality at given bitrates, or potentially subject to potential IP problems) until you’re blue in the face, but you just cannot reconcile the fact that Apple feels that animated graphics and interactive interfaces need to be created in an open standard like HTML 5 but video in a proprietary one like h.264. Apple could create both a video compression standard (and open source it like they have with Webkit) and hardware encoder/decoders for it if they wanted, but they do not. Of course, they’re a member of the proprietary licensing group that collects h.264 licensing fees, so once again we’re left with Apple just wanting to use their proprietary standards.

Really what it comes down to is Apple is winning the latest version of the Great Technological Dick-Measuring Contest (heretofore abbreviated GTDMC): the app count. Apple can boast 180,00 apps or however many, a multiple of the number for Android and everyone else. Just like previous GTDMCs, including megapixels in digital cameras and clock speed on processors, the app store GTDMC is not at all meaningful by itself but sells product to the uninformed. Ask anyone who has sold electronics (I did back in the days of MP and GHz). Average Joe Sixpack doesn’t know or care about anything but the number.

This is the real reason Apple is banning anything not programmed in their developer tools from their devices. Really, who cares if later versions of the iPhone OS make your fart apps stop farting? Not Apple certainly. Probably not users either, they’ll just upgrade the ones that the developers felt valuable enough to upgrade and simply replace the rest. The average lifespan of any given app on a particular device is about that of the common houselfy, so I can’t imagine breaking compatibility is a concern to anyone involved.

What Apple doesn’t want, and Steve Jobs neglected to mention, is to let the App Store become a cheap commodity. If Adobe can make their Creative Suite export your flash program to an iPhone app, what’s to stop them from letting it export to an Android one, and a WebOS one, and a Blackberry one as well? The answer is nothing, in fact it’s almost certain they’d do this given that Adobe’s mission from day one, when they were doing this with printable documents, is to make it so that developers can write their code once and run it anywhere.

And then what happens to all of the exclusive “Made for iPhone apps”? Just as gaming console makers love games made solely for their platform, Apple wants your location sharing service to only run on iPhone. This is the real reason why they’re cramming Xcode down your throats.

Another point Steve-o (that’s what we call him at the poker table) makes is battery life. To me this is a fallacious argument. The device supporting Flash does not have to equal the device not supporting h.264. Battery life could be maintained, such as it is now, when viewing YouTube or any other site with h.264 files ready to go. And for sites that still have their content in only Flash for whatever reason (Hulu being the most notable by far) the customer can simply choose.

Also, if there’s one thing that Apple products have been notorious for it’s poor battery life. Apple was the first OEM, way back in the early days of the iPod, a line of products which has had worse battery life than every major competitor ever since its inception, to realize that people don’t really care about it that much. They just need enough to get through the day. The iPhone (like most smartphones with large screens) gets abysmal battery life compared to the clamshells everyone had before, and guess what, nobody cares. You just plug it in every night and you’re happy.

On the whole though, all of his points illustrate exactly why all of us web developers want Flash to die. Though most of the ones I’ve talked to tend to agree with my statement that it won’t happen soon, we’re all hoping it does. But that doesn’t mean it’s sensible to not support it now.

One of the big things everyone working on the web has been talking about recently is HTML 5. The concept has been simmering for a long time, but the iPad’s conspicuous lack of Flash support (on a device seemingly designed for sites that use it like Hulu or Kongregate) really brought awareness to the issue. Apple is almost certainly trying their damnedest to replace Adobe’s stranglehold on the net with something open.

In general, though, I’m skeptical this will work any time soon. Open standards bodies move abysmally slowly, and perhaps the only thing slower in software is corporate adoption of new browsers. And like it or not, a huge percentage of web surfing (enough that there’s almost never a business case for ignoring it) comes from corporate offices.

To put it in perspective, IE7 came out way back in 2006, and IE6, the bane of all web developers, is still holding solid at ~9% market share. IE7 is at 14%, even though IE8 came out over a year ago. The reasons for this are simple. Corporations have software (intranets, CMSes, etc) built at a certain time for a certain browser, and upgrading to a new browser involves expense with absolutely no benefit at all. Anything your employees need to do at work can be done in IE6. And if Facebook doesn’t support it, well, you don’t pay your employees to use Facebook. (I do, but not everyone makes Facebook games for a living).

When you get down the business case, building your web apps in HTML 5 vs. Flash comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. If either were an equally costly solution, you’d probably use HTML 5 for most things. It’s a better developer experience, and a better user experience. It’s almost always a win-win. In fact in most cases, Flash is probably more costly. It’s brutal to develop in (relative to something like Ruby on Rails) and often requires you to deliver larger files to accomplish anything than you otherwise would have to.

But on the web, scale is large and both marginal and fixed costs are so low as to be irrelevant. If you’re making the next Farmville, whatever extra costs are involved in supporting IE6 and 7 right now are made up for 1,000x over by the extra 25% of customers.

So let’s suppose the best case here. HTML 5 gets ratified formally tomorrow. IE9 comes out tomorrow too, with full support. How long is it until the cost benefit analysis says that developers aren’t shooting themselves in the foot to make their games in a canvas rather than Flash? The answer is years even then, and HTML 5 won’t get ratified tomorrow (and probably not even this year) and IE9 won’t support much of it when it does happen.

So I think Apple is making a big mistake with their avoidance of Flash. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping I’m wrong, because I’d love to see Flash die as much as the next guy, but I’m not holding my breath. The web evolves very slowly, and Android (on which Flash should ship sometime this year) is such a serious competitive threat now that it just doesn’t feel like it’s right to lose on feature.

I suppose there you have two competing long-term goals. One long-term goal is to get a bloated, non-open standard the hell of the internet, which would benefit just about everyone other than Adobe. The other is to win the smart phone land grab, the way Windows did with desktop computers. I think if it were me I’d err on the side of the latter, especially since it’s not clear their actions can tip the balance for the former. It’s possible that Apple could have Flash now and still see a future, 5-10 years down the road, in which it’s dead. I feel like if I were them, or Microsoft, I’d do what I could to support HTML 5 as soon as possible, and as well as possible, and then just wait it out.

I went to Best Buy Saturday and got to play around with the iPad a little bit. My initial impression was that it’s pretty much exactly what it looked like: a big-ass iPod Touch.

There are a few immediately obvious ramifications of the much larger size. For one, web browsing is much less unpleasant. On a phone-sized screen there’s all this pinching and zooming, and slow loading even on Wi-Fi. It’s painful. The iPad is large enough that it’s substantially better.

It also feels much faster. I don’t know what’s under the hood, but you get the feeling that the larger form factor allowed for a better processor, probably because it could fit a much larger battery. It’s pretty responsive.

The larger size changes the keyboard as well. It’s kind of awkward really because the device is too large to allow for thumb typing, Blackberry style, like you would on the iPhone, but even in landscape mode it’s much too small to just sit down on a table and type on like a normal keyboard. I think on the whole it might actually be worse than typing on a phone-sized screen just because it feels like it should be better and isn’t. I hate virtual keypads though, so if you’re one of those nut jobs who claims to like typing on an iPhone as much as a normal keyboard, your mileage might vary.

If you’re not a total fanboy, you might not care for it too much, but probably won’t hate it simply because you won’t be doing too much typing. The device is not going to replace your laptop. The lack of multitasking ensures that. Using a Palm Pre has me spoiled, and I kept clicking the center button to switch from one task to another only to find it close what I was using. I guess if I were an iPhone user I wouldn’t have that problem, but I still wouldn’t be leaving my Lenovo at home on a trip. The iPad might be used in its place on the plane though.

Reading on it is much like reading on a computer monitor, and a good one. Great for short periods, but I don’t think I’d want to read a novel on it but for just a little web surfing or news browsing it’s fantastic. So if you’re using a Kindle, I don’t think the iPad’s going to replace it, anymore than your iPod replaced your vinyl collection. It’s just a different style of device.

It lacks Flash, which is unfortunate because the screen is large enough that casual games might be great on it. I tried watching Hulu on it and couldn’t, which made me frown, but there’s a YouTube app so if Avril Lavigne videos are your thing, you’re set. In fact this might be the ultimate kittens-on-treadmills viewing device.

The guy at Best Buy said they had gotten in 25 of each model. The cheapest one (16 GB) sold out but the others were still in stock. I suspect the vast majority of the demand will be at the lowest price point, and that’s understandable. Overall the iPad seems like a cool toy but not much more. And, not $500 cool.

If it were $200 I could see it having a place in the living room. I don’t think I’d ever bother taking it anywhere (expect maybe a plane, which it seems almost designed for) because it’s not much better than a phone for casual browsing on the go. But for Googling to find out what happened in the previous episode of Lost while you’re watching the current one and eating cheese straight from the can in your recliner, you really can’t beat a big-ass iPod Touch.