Comments by Albert Willis

Lets summarize a few things:

* Even though this is rarely covered by mainstream tech writers, not everyone that owns an iPhone wants Flash. Knowledgeable iPhone users and developers know that Flash is crap and they do NOT want it on their iPhones.

* Most tech writers seem oblivious to the fact that Apple isn’t going to allow 3rd party animation, video (Flash) or runtime environments (Flash, Java, Adobe AIR, etc.) on the iPhone. Sure, there are technical reasons, but strategically, Apple isn’t going to allow core iPhone OS functionality and usability to get fragmented by having 3rd parties play at this level. A Flash-based game will act differently from one developed using Cocoa Touch, for example. And performance won’t be as good, etc.

* Apple has already decided that it’s going to use open technologies for video, animation and graphics on the iPhone: HTML5 video support, CSS animation (works now: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/) and H.264 for video playback and streaming, OpenGL for 3D.

* Flash not being available on the iPhone isn’t an oversight; it’s a deliberate decision to not having some other company’s proprietary animation and runtime environment on their device, especially since it doesn’t advance things for Apple in the long term. Same thing for Java J2ME which is for lowest common denominator computing and that’s not what Apple does–at all.

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Wow. Interesting how @ParisLemon doesn’t get that Flash ain’t happening on the iPhone, no matter how hard he looks. And for the record, there’s enough HTML5 out there on mobile devices (all of the WebKit-enabled devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, some Nokia phones) for Flash Lite to not matter so much by year-end.

I’ve written about why Flash isn’t needed or wanted on the iPhone a few times now: http://www.backtype.com/alwill.....2ba5627e84

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The Twitter ecosystem is extremely innovative, which takes the pressure off Twitter from having to make big changes most of the time. In lots of ways, Facebook is attempting to Twitter-ize themselves out of the corner that backed themselves into, after they failed to acquire Twitter.

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Om–yes, you can where this is going. I had the same thought, after Facebook implemented “real-time” updates that @ replies couldn’t be that far away. One of the major social limitations is not being able to reference multiple people easily in a status update on Facebook.

The tagging feature of Facebook Notes is a good first step, but @ replies would be much better.

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Yes, having locations supported in the Mac version of OmniFocus would be useful now. And lets not forget that Core Location API is coming to Snow Leopard, so future of OmniFocus running on Macs will be able to support locations too.

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Excellent post Steve–you get where this is all heading.

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So, a users with a 1st generation iPhone (or something else) shouldn’t upgrade to an iPhone 3GS because there’s a chance that Apple might choose another carrier a year (or longer) from now?

And that everyone who has an iPhone is unhappy with AT&T?

All of the carriers suck in one way or another; there’s no escaping that. For the record, at least in Boston, 3G from AT&T just works. It’s not like what I hear about San Francisco or what I’ve experienced in New York.

The only viable alternative for Apple is Verizon, but that means making a CDMA phone. Yes, I’m aware of the plans for all of the carriers, including Verizon to migrate to 4G technology that works across GSM and CDMA networks, but we’re not there yet. And we may not get there on the timeframe that’s currently out there, meaning Apple would have to make a CDMA device. If you listen to Apple’s conference call from last quarter, acting CEO Tim Cook was clear that Apple doesn’t want to make a CDMA phone if it can avoid it. And it can be avoided by AT&T writing a big enough check.

In the meanwhile, AT&T will have 7.2 Mbps HSDPA later this year available for the iPhone 3GS. And there’s a better chance that Apple will stay with AT&T for the foreseeable future, as that’s the easiest thing for them to do, especially because everything else is vaporware at the moment.

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While I agree that there should be more than one way to make an appointment, Apple is often a victim of its own success. Many people have multiple ways of getting on the web–neighbors, libraries, schools, friends, additional machines, etc. So it's hard to fault them for making everyone use the web to make an appointment.

For example, there should be an iPhone application that allows you to make a Genius appointment. Huh--I think we just identified what Apple would call a "third party opportunity."

But I get how inconvenient web-only can be when you're in a jam.

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+1

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The concept that somehow we need or want Flash on the iPhone is very misguided in my opinion. On the practical level, it would slow Mobile Safari, take precious memory (there’s only 128 MB on current iPhones) and drain the battery faster. There’s no plugin architecture in Mobile Safari currently, which means it would have to be implemented at the system level, with the cooperation of Apple. That’s not going to happen.

On a strategic level, there’s no way Apple is going to turn over control of its graphics/animation on it’s hottest product to a 3rd party, especially when they already have a graphics/animation platform called QuickTime (perhaps you’ve heard of it?) that’s coming to the iPhone in phases. H.264 (a.k.a. MPEG-4) hardware playback and Core Animation already exist on the device.

Mobile Safari already supports CSS Animation–just by using CSS and no plugins, you can do animation in the browser, that would have normally required something like Flash: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/. It’s on its way to becoming a W3C/WHATWG standard. Being part of WebKit means other devices using WebKit (Android, Palm Pre, some Nokia phones) will also get CSS Animation for “free”. Apple by itself has over 37 million iPhones/iPod Touches where this already works.

In summary, Flash on the iPhone makes no sense technically or strategically. Apple didn’t get to where it is today by making dumb decisions; allowing Flash on the iPhone would be as dumb as it gets.

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If you actually think Arrington cares about what readers think, then you don’t understand how business work today.

He knows he can’t please everyone, so he doesn’t even try. He goal is provide a useful service to the people who do come–not chasing the 99% of the people who’ll never come. The people who get the importance of Twitter and the other things that TC covers will keep coming. But regarding the people who think TC is lame and doesn’t cover relevant topics, Arrington doesn’t care.

It’s similar to Apple and Steve Jobs: he doesn’t sell to over 90% of the computer buying public. He doesn’t chase the people who want to buy a $299 machine from Walmart, because that’s not who Apple is. In that sense, Jobs doesn’t care about the vast majority of people who buy computers. But Apple is the most profitable hardware manufacturer on a profit margin basis, with over $29 billion in the bank. Funny–when Apple switched to Intel processors in 2006, many people thought they should get out of the hardware business and license Mac OS X to PC makers. That looks incredibly foolish when you look back at it now.

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Steve Gillmor is correct–RSS (as an end-user technology) is dead. But most of you all don’t get why. RSS was always about plumbing; geeks and early adopters tried to make RSS about end-user consumption. Remember, these are the same people who thought “XML” in orange letters was an acceptable UX to tell users that there was an RSS feed on the page.

Outside of the geek/techie echo chamber, I’ve never seen intentional mainstream use of RSS readers. Most regular folks were using RSS’s plumbing on their iGoogle and MyYahoo portal pages without realizing that’s what they were doing. And now that the destination web and portals have been eclipsed by a new generation of services (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.), RSS will return to its rightful place as infrastructure and not something most folks need to be concerned about.

I’m having the same experience as Steve–I get all of my interesting and useful links to check out via Twitter. I hardly ever open a RSS reader anymore. In fact, the quality of the links is so much higher than when I just subscribed to stuff and I get to see stuff I would never know about because the people I follow pass along such good stuff.

The dynamism of Twitter is what blows a RSS reader away. I love getting tweets from folks at conferences or events (like the Technology Tasting at Facebook last week) as it happens. RSS doesn’t help with that.

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I agree—retweet should be a function of the Twitter website and of the Twitter API. I actually said this a while ago: http://www.backtype.com/alwillis/comment/24377567.

As Dave said, retweeting shouldn't take any of the precious 140 characters of a tweet—I couldn't agree more. When Twitter gets out of firefighting mode and starts adding features again, this should be among the first they add.

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As a commenter, I like using Disqus; glad you made the move.

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The recession isn’t hype; it’s real. However, good companies with innovative products will do better than marginal companies with least common denominator products.

Imagine if there wasn’t a recession what these numbers would have been. Incredible.

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