The HTML5 plot thickens… Apple bans Flash

Apple has decided to stop shipping Flash pre-installed on their devices beginning with the newly released MacBook Air. No one was really sure what to expect when news broke that the MacBook Air didn’t come with Flash out of the box. There were a lot of cool things to ship along with the MacBook Air: the higher resolution displays, the USB restore drive, the solid state memory… but those pale in comparison to the potential political statement they’re making by removing Flash. Was it an oversight? Was it deliberate? Apple answered that question with an official statement from spokesman Bill Evans: We’re happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe. Following those words, Bill went on to say that they would leave the software out of all future Macs citing the necessity for the user to install the software and keep it up-to-date. Apple claims it will be easier for their customers to do it themselves. Really? That’s not the Apple we’re familiar with. Apple’s main technological purpose is to take complicated devices and dumb [...]

Adobe reveals a switchable HTML5 video player

The HTML5/Flash battle between Apple and Adobe has been anything but pretty ever since Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on Flash article in April. Adobe responded in May with an ad campaign that targeted Apple’s closed ideologies. Ever since then, both companies have kept relatively quite on the matter until Wednesday when Apple decided to ship the new MacBook Air without Flash pre-installed. It comes as no surprise that Adobe would come back with a much more “open” standard for viewing videos online. Their new widget allows you to play video content in a dynamic wrapper that will switch between HTML5 and Flash depending on your browser. It plays with the HTML5 <video> tags by default but will drop those and play with Flash if your browser doesn’t support HTML5. It’s quite slick. We tried to throw the demo into page here on CTA but were unable to achieve proper playback from our server… we’re looking into it. With that said, we were able to take the demo and play it locally in both Safari and Chrome without a hitch. It wasn’t completely smooth sailing though. We were unable to get any of the menu items (as shown in the [...]

Apple removes fake Flash ads from the iPad promotional video

Remember the speculative post we wrote about the fact that the iPad is showing Flash content in Apple’s promotional video? Well, it’s been replaced with a non-Flash version that shows the infamous blue lego. It appears as though we’re never going to see Flash on the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch… especially with Steve’s comments from the Apple town hall meeting. We’re not terribly disappointed with Apple’s decision to avoid Flash… we’re more disappointed with the fact that most sites are using it to display their content. Flash is notoriously buggy and a resource hog. Why watch low-quality hosted content instead of high-quality local content? The mere fact that we have instant access to thousands of TV episodes and movies will create a demand for hosted content: no one has a collection as large as the internet. We really hope to see services like Hulu, the TV networks, and even YouTube move away from Flash sooner rather than later. From a technical standpoint, Apple is completely correct: Flash sucks. But they also shouldn’t ignore the fact that it’s the current standard… they should be aggressively moving a different direction, working with companies to support different media playback: we all know [...]

The future of Apple according to Steve Jobs

Mac Rumors has a great post outlining some things that Steve said to the Infinite Loop Apple employees this past week. Two independent sources have confirmed that the following bullets are topics that were discussed in the town hall meeting: Steve was very candid about their relationship with Google. He explained that Apple didn’t get into the search business, Google came into the phone business. He’s obviously not very happy about the situation and as a result… we’re going to get better software and hardware for the iPhone. Supposedly, we’re going to see updates so aggressive that Google and its phone OS, Android, won’t be able to keep up with the pace. Steve specifically called Adobe lazy, and that’s the main reason they’re not supporting Flash on the iPhone OS. The Mac Flash client has been notorious for being… well, garbage. We’re sure that Apple is afraid that the iPhone client would be even worse. According to Steve, the majority of reported desktop/laptop crashes are caused by Adobe’s Flash. He also went on to boast about the advent of HTML5, saying that no one will be using Flash in the near future… the world is moving to HTML5. CTA actually [...]