Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Crikey, the moderation here has gone a bit overboard. I logged in just now to read the A vs A mega-thread, and it isn't here!
So I came over here to watch the fun.
You know .... thread started as a straight news item by Coug or Handruin.
Merc wades in and delivers the ultimate Adobe Sucks Rant.
The mad Apple Fanboy (remind me of his name, Tannin, slips my mind at the moment) writes 17 pages of impassioned posts probably intended to restore God to his Rightful Place at the right hand of Steve,
Pretty much the entire Storage Forum community wades in to dump a large pile of shite on Apple, Apple fanboys, and (in the case of the more intelligent and industry-savvy ones) also dump a pile on Adobe.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/10/01/28/tablet.locks.ibooks.to.apple.hardware.adobe.says/Microsoft corporate communications head Frank Shaw has quickly rejected former VP Dick Brass' assertions that the company is no longer innovative by citing examples of what Shaw views as success
http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/01/30/jobs.takes.on.adobe.and.google.at.meeting/Following an embarrassing moment during the iPad announcement, however, when Flash objects did not display on the New York Times website, Adobe has decided to resume its criticism of Apple. Flash has never been supported on devices with the iPhone OS, mainly because of Apple concerns that it could rapidly drain battery life. In rejecting any version of the technology, Adobe suggests that Apple is preventing people from accessing "70 percent of games," as well as "75 percent of video." Sites such as Hulu, ESPN and JibJab are crippled on an iPad.
Regarding ePub, Adobe charges that books bought on an iPad will be inaccessible to other e-readers. While ePub is technically an open standard, Apple is said to have adopted provisions in the format for DRM. Even if competing e-books can be loaded into iBooks, the reverse may not be true. Adobe produces a Mac and Windows e-reader called Digital Editions.
The iBooks criticism is similar to now-defunct complaints about music from the iTunes Store. Although iPods and iPhones have always been able to play unprotected MP3 files, tracks bought through iTunes were for years unplayable on non-Apple hardware. All albums were made DRM-free as of April 2009.
An inside report from within an Apple town hall meeting has revealed some of CEO Steve Jobs' blunt criticisms, particularly against Google. In the wake of the iPad launch, Jobs claimed the search firm's motto of "Don't Be Evil" is simply "bullsh*t" and that the new rival is fully intent on killing the iPhone with Android despite the companies' partnership on iPhone services. He similarly pointed out that the aggression was largely one-sided and that Apple hadn't entered search.
Notably, the attendee also mentioned to Wired that Jobs called Adobe "lazy" and confirmed the commonly held belief that Apple refuses to offer Flash for the iPhone due to stability. Since Flash is the single most common source of crashes for Safari and even the Mac as a whole, it would likely fare poorly on handhelds as well, he said. Jobs, like some critics, believes many sites will move away from Flash and towards HTML5, which supports direct video streaming without a plugin.
While not part of any public statement, Jobs' comments signal a more determined stance not to be outdone by Android as well as a rejection of Adobe's criticism of the iPad for again abandoning Flash. The software house has argued that Apple isn't providing the whole web, although Apple has countered both by offering an enhanced YouTube app as well as loosening App Store limits to let many third-party developers offer apps that would normally need Flash, such as Qik or Ustream.
Adobe vs Flash
But it wasn't too long ago that Adobe was itself trying to kill Flash, back when Flash was owned by Macromedia. Adobe supported SVG as an alternative to doing vector graphics on the web, and promoted SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) as an open specification for presenting multimedia using XML.
Of course, now that Adobe owns Flash, it has dropped all interest in advocating those open standards, because with its acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe also obtained what Brimelow might call "tyrannical control over developers" who create dynamic web content.
Canvas vs Flash
Meanwhile, the most significant threat to Adobe's Flash platform is HTML5's Canvas. Adobe is participating in HTML5 development, but is among those working to split Canvas from the HTML5 specification, a move that would greatly weaken the next version of the web's markup language from delivering the kinds of features that are often currently implemented in Flash.
Another company with less than enthusiastic interest in Canvas is Microsoft, which like Adobe has its own web plugin architecture designed to replace web standards with proprietary binary code that requires a separate runtime. Microsoft will be protecting the interests of Silverlight by releasing Internet Explorer 9 with support for many HTML5 features but lacking an implementation of Canvas.
Canvas was developed by Apple within WebKit to power features like Dashboard widgets. It enables dynamic, scripted rendering of 2D graphics inside of an element that can be embedded in HTML.
Canvas was then adopted by Mozilla and Opera, after which Apple then submitted the technology to WHATWG to become part of the HTML5 specification. While based on Apple-patented technologies, the company has agreed to provide royalty-free patent licensing for Canvas technologies when it becomes part of the official W3C recommendation.
So when Brimelow says his company is "not looking to kill anything or anyone," it can only be because he's either unaware of (or working carefully not to say anything about) HTML5 Canvas. Brimelow might also be selectively forgetting that Adobe, and Macromedia before it, also did nothing for years to deliver either an optimized, functional Flash plugin for the Mac platform or to deliver a mobile version of Flash that actually worked prior to the success of the iPhone.
Brimelow concluded his post by insisting that he "will not be giving Apple another cent of my money until there is a leadership change over there," then announcing that he was not actually trying to organize a boycott, then ending with "go screw yourself Apple," before noting "comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots."
The report also stated Adobe's position that "more than 96 percent of U.S. Web surfers have Flash installed on their computers, according to researcher StatOwl," without noting that the iPhone now accounts for more than 60% of all smartphone traffic globally, while the iPod touch accounts for nearly all (93%) of web traffic among "mobile Internet devices." It's not hard to guess that iPad will similarly account for most "tablet" web traffic.
Having locked up the PC browser market, Adobe has a very strong position in controlling how interactive content is delivered. But having no showing at all in the mobile properties Apple has created is a serious problem, one Adobe needs more than angry rhetoric to fight against.
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Quicktime is just... Unforgivable...~~snip