Linked List: January 29, 2010

Friday, 29 January 2010

Adobe Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow Plays the Porno Card 

I’ve been wondering for a while how much of the angst over iPhone OS’s lack of Flash is about porno. And as for Flash games, isn’t it utterly obvious that existing Flash games, which work via keyboard and mouse, wouldn’t work at all on devices which lack both keyboard and mouse?

Anyway, I presume Brimelow put this together as an intended slag against the iPad. I look at this, though, and my first thought is that Brimelow ought to start looking for a new job.

Update: DF reader Ryan Cooley emails with this alternative take on MobileSafari’s lack of Flash. And, even better, several readers emailed to point out that the porno site Brimelow used as his example, Bang Bros, in fact has an iPhone-optimized web site that serves video using QuickTime.

Lastly, I didn’t mean to imply that Brimelow ought to start looking for a new job because he linked to a porno site as example of Flash. He probably deserves credit for honesty for that. (I have no idea how that’ll fly politically inside Adobe, though.) I’m saying he ought to look for a new job because his current one is as an evangelist for a technology that is past its prime and is now measurably in decline.

John Nack: ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ 

Thoughtful piece from Adobe’s John Nack on Flash. Nack works for Adobe, but on Photoshop, not Flash. The whole thing is worth reading because I think he’s genuinely trying to be fair about the whole situation. But this bit betrays a bit of pro-Adobe mindset:

And today, more than 15 years after Netscape debuted, Flash remains the only way to, say, display a vector chart across browsers (i.e., such that you can count on every viewer seeing it). That’s sad — especially given that Adobe plowed a hell of a lot of time and money into trying to get the open SVG standardized and adopted.

The real situation is that today, two and a half years after the iPhone debuted, web developers can no longer count on every viewer being able to render Flash. The percentage of web user agents with Flash installed is now going down, not up. My money says that trend is permanent, and further, it’ll reach a tipping point in the not-so-distant future and Flash will turn into something like Internet Explorer.

Microsoft Reaction to iPad 

David Worthington interviews Brandon Watson, “director of product management in the developer platform at Microsoft”:

Watson claimed that many developers of applications for the iPhone OS–which the iPad uses–are not making money. Developing applications for the iPhone and iPad is expensive, he said, because iPhone OS uses the Objective-C language rather than Microsoft’s more pervasive .NET platform. And Apple’s control over the platform has alienated some people that make software for its products, he said.

Yes, there is much jealousy from iPhone developers at the sacks full of money being made by Zune and Windows Mobile app developers.

Sortfolio 

My thanks to 37signals for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Sortfolio. Sortfolio is a web site that helps web designers find clients and clients find web designers — visually. The best way to find a designer is to browse examples of their previous work; the best way for designers to pitch themselves is to show off their work. That’s how Sortfolio works.

Plus you can filter by price and location and all sorts of other cleverness. No surprise that a site that’s all about finding good designers is itself very well designed.