Jobs: Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is
"bullsh*t"

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 30 January 2010 11:55:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

An inside report from within an Apple town hall meeting has revealed some of CEO Steve Jobs' blunt c...

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Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes

post from Daring Fireball on 30 January 2010 10:30:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Robert Scoble has a good analogy:

Let?s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn?t work with a ton of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant Internet Explorer back then.

Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these broken links. Just like Adobe is trying to say that Apple?s iPad is going to fail because of its own set of broken links.

But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn?t work on Firefox? I haven?t.

What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the standards-based web.

The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans any longer.

Regarding those blue boxes that indicate embedded Flash content in MobileSafari, think of it this way: Who can make them go away?

Adobe can’t. They can’t put Flash Player on iPhone OS on their own.
Apple could, but they won’t.
Users could make Apple change its mind by refusing to buy iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads because they don’t support Flash. That does not seem to be happening. In fact, iPhone sales are accelerating.
Web site producers could do it, by replacing or providing an alternative to the Flash content on their sites.
Uh, magical unicorns?

Adobe’s initial reaction to the iPad seems to be geared toward #3 — emphasizing publicly that iPhone OS devices are not capable of rendering the (admittedly, substantial amounts of) Flash content on the web today. Good luck with that.

Adobe’s fear, of course, is that #4 is what will happen. And with good reason, since I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing this happen already. Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow made his little poster showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they’re missing anything because, well, they’re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version of Brimelow’s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.

The explanation is simple. Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they’re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous. Few technologies get to 100 percent market penetration; Flash came remarkably close. A few years ago you could say that, effectively, Flash was everywhere. It made total sense for sites like YouTube and Hulu to go with Flash.

Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”. Adobe’s own statistics on Flash’s market penetration claim 99 percent penetration as of last month. That’s because, according to their survey methodology, they’re only counting “PCs” — which ignores the entire sort of devices which have brought about this debate. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers.

Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.

What’s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn’t care about what’s good for Adobe. They care about what’s good for Hulu. Hulu isn’t a Flash site, it’s a video site. Developers go where the users are.

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http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/blue_boxes

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Macmillan confirms Amazon dispute details, silent
on Apple

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 30 January 2010 07:15:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Macmillan in a special news update backed many of the rumors behind Amazon's decision to pull its Ki...

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Flashs Decline on Lifehacker, From 2006 to 2010

post from Daring Fireball on 30 January 2010 05:21:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Gina Trapani:

Because its readership represents a mixed group of both Mac and Windows users — albeit more tech-savvy ones than your average internet surfer — I ran the numbers for Lifehacker, which currently gets about 39 million visitors a month. As you can see in the chart above, the number of Lifehacker visitors without Flash installed nearly tripled from 2.32% in 2006, to 6.07% in 2009.

Gina quotes this tweet from me today, where I mentioned that for January 2010, 32 percent of DF web site visitors do not have Flash enabled. A little over 7 percent of web visitors were using MobileSafari. I suspect most of the rest have Flash installed, but not enabled thanks to things like ClickToFlash for Safari and Flashblock for Firefox.

?

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http://smarterware.org/4978/flashs-decline-on-lifehacker-from-2006-to-2010

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Veenix Technologies Introduces Colorful Approach
to Font Organization

post from on 30 January 2010 05:15:00 PM. ©

Veenix Technologies today announces TypeBook Creator 2.4, its highly acclaimed Macintosh font/type[...]

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http://prmac.com/release-id-10408.htm

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The iPad and Chrome OS Netbooks Are on a
Collision Course

post from Daring Fireball on 30 January 2010 05:07:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Good observation from MG Siegler: the iPad and Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS netbooks are aimed at the same space — that between smartphones and PCs.

One major difference: Apple’s iPhone and iPad are clearly on the same page technology-wise and concept-wise, whereas Android and Chrome OS are not. The iPad’s popularity (obviously, at this point, measured in terms of interest rather than sales) is propelled by the success of the iPhone and the UIKit App Store. Let’s say Android has a banner year — that the Droid and Nexus One and whatever other handsets are coming in the next few months sell like hotcakes. How does that help sell Chrome OS netbooks, which are neither conceptually nor technically compatible with Android?

That doesn’t mean Android and Chrome OS can’t both succeed. But they exemplify how Google seems like a federated company.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/29/ipad-chrome-os/

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The Omni Group: iPad or Bust

post from Daring Fireball on 30 January 2010 04:28:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Ken Case:

Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases — but we think iPad is really important: important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps.

Yes. Five. We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.

As one wise friend observed to me this week, AppKit may be the next Carbon. UIKit is the frontier.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/01/29/ipad-or-bust/

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Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

The Onion:

“He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,” said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years.

?

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http://www.theonion.com/content/news/bunch_of_phonies_mourn_j_d

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Why buy an Apple iPhone 3GS

The latest, Apple iPhone 3GS, is the fastest and most powerful yet. It is the hottest mobile phone on the market at launching a variety of impressive and useful applications. The iPhone is much more than a cellphone. It allows, internet tethering, so that you can use it to get a 3G, connection on your PC or [...]

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http://www.macbroadband.co.uk/smart-mac-users-buy-an-apple-iphone/

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Back up your data online

You might have considered backing up important data on hard disc. That’s OK but not the safest option. In the event of a fire or burglary your vital data could be lost forever. Why not spread your risk with, online storage,? It’s one of the web’s fastest-growing businesses. So are you interested to learn which [...]

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http://www.macbroadband.co.uk/backing-up-your-data-online/

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