Linked List: February 1, 2010

Monday, 1 February 2010

Why the iPad Will Fail and Help Windows 7 to Succeed ★

OK.

This is so fucking great: an HTML5 video player by Jilion with beautiful playback controls, click-to-play control over automatic buffering, full-window playback with gorgeous animated transitions, and more. Works great in Safari, MobileSafari, and Chrome; Firefox support is in the works. Oh, and if you’re using a current WebKit Nightly build: full-screen playback. Seriously, this is the real deal — full-screen H.264 playback with no Flash, no browser plugins, full iPhone OS support, and sane CPU usage, better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash.

When I wrote this piece on HTML5 and auto-buffering last month, I was focused only on the built-in browser controls. SublimeVideo shows that I was wrong (or at least myopic) — the existing browser support is probably good enough, it just needs to be supplemented with JavaScript to exert necessary control over buffering and more attractive playback controls.

Update: Their server was down for a while, but appears to be back now.

Zeldman on Flash, iPad, and Standards ★

The big Z:

Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.

And his conclusion is spot-on. Adobe has a golden opportunity to make tools that embrace the HTML5 future.

John Scalzi on Amazon’s Botched Handling of the Macmillan Situation ★

John Scalzi:

Leaving aside the moral, philosophical, cultural and financial implications of this weekend’s Amazon/Macmillan slapfight and What It All Means for book readers and the future of the publishing industry, in one very real sense the whole thing was an exercise in public communications, a process by which two very large companies made a case for themselves in the public arena. And in this respect, we can say this much without qualification: oh, sweet Jesus, did Amazon ever hump the bunk.

BBC iPlayer on iPhone ★

Old news (from March 2008), but relevant to the current discussion: the BBC’s online video (available only within the U.K.) uses Flash for PCs, but works just fine with MobileSafari by sending straight H.264.

Vice Magazine Interviews Berkeley Breathed ★

Speaking of interviews with heartachingly talented comic strip creators, Vice has a great interview with Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed. Asked how much he planned out the writing:

The problem is that you’re asking a guy who didn’t think of any individual strip or story line longer than it takes to read this sentence. I drew in a manic, sweat-flinging state of deadline panic EVERY week. Not most weeks. EVERY week. For ten years. I drew what occurred to me as I stared at the same blank strips I’d been watching for six days, and only because the plane that would deliver them to my syndicate editor was due to take off at 5:30 AM, about seven hours from that moment.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Interviews Bill Watterson ★

First interview with the creator of Calvin and Hobbes in 20 years. Not much in it, but you take what you can get.

From the DF Archive: ‘And Oranges’ ★

The aforementioned link to Mark Pilgrim on The Setup sent me back to a re-read of this piece I wrote in 2006, when Pilgrim announced his switch from Mac OS X to Ubuntu. I wrote:

I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else. Pilgrim, to me, is a quintessential Mac user in that regard; and what he’s doing is wondering if maybe things might suck less somewhere else.

This is one of my favorite DF pieces ever. Don’t miss Pilgrim’s response to it, either.

Mark Pilgrim on the Setup ★

Mark Pilgrim:

I’ve had my current desktop for a little over two years. I want to continue using it for another 20. I mean that literally: this computer, this keyboard, this mouse, these three monitors. 20 years. There’s no technical reason the hardware can’t last that long, so it’s a matter of whether there will be useful software to run on it.

Fascinating.

Flash Headed the Way of Director ★

Michael Pinto:

Then the damn web came along and ruined it all: There was a web version of Director called Shockwave, but due to the overhead of bitmap graphics another program called Flash started to build rapid momentum. Macromedia would acquire Flash and rumor has it that Director is still around but the notion of getting a Lingo gig is history. And now that it’s the year 2010 I’m seeing the same thing slowly start to happen to Flash all over again.

(Via Gedeon Maheux.)