This is typical of post-iPhone Apple, unfortunately. If you look at pre-iPhone apple, they had their hands in a number of places and were making some cool stuff. This is one example, but look at their various other pro and/or creative tools. They had some small but interesting ones such as Motion and Aperature. They also had tools like Final Cut Pro, which swept the NLE world, and Shake, which when they bought Nothing Real (creators of Shake) was taking over the high-end compositing world and was used in many of the big movies that needed heavy visual effects. They also bought Silicon Grail, makers of Chalice and RAYZ, niche high-end compositing apps that were moving up in the world.

And then they realized they could be FAR more profitable selling phones and without fanfare have slowly but surely left all of their little niche markets behind. They convinced companies to switch their infrastructure over to Macs to use their amazing tools, and then just leave them high and dry. I get that it makes business sense, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as I'm sure it does to many of the companies that dumped huge amounts of money into their products.

Well, not me directly. My father bought my son an eMachines computer, against my advice, this past Christmas. My son was staying with my folks this past month, with his computer, and it turned out the hard drive failed (despite being only 7 months old). My dad ended up paying for a recovery disc and then taking it to Best Buy (presumably where he bought the computer) for them to install it - which I'm guessing wasn't free. It wouldn't have necessarily been cheaper to get a new computer, but it sounded like a big crap fest. And with that kind of quality, what's the cost associated when you actually care about the data on your hard drive? Sadly, getting my parents or son to do regular backups just ain't gonna happen.

I wonder how much they've really curbed piracy through their fear mongering, as one significant change since Napster, et al is a HUGE improvement in legal digital distribution of music. Now, if I hear a song on the radio and I just want that one song... especially at 1am... I can go and grab it. For about a buck. In a few moments. Frankly, it's just far, far more convenient for people, hence that alone curbs some of the issues. Beyond that, with my iPhone and Shazam I can now hear a song on TV, the movies, the coffee shop, anywhere and in a few moments purchase and listen to it, no matter where I'm at. This is a level of convenience that Napster, et al. just couldn't offer - esp. after the networks got more and more clogged with shite and greedy downloaders. So I have to question what had more impact for the casual pirate - the RIAA or services like iTunes, Amazon music, etc.

Apparently the author who wrote about multitasking hasn't actually tried it out yet, because he's off-base. While the app tray does quickly get cluttered, as he mentions, the lack of true multitasking is exactly why this doesn't matter - you can have as many apps down there as you want but they're not actively consuming resources. Where he's really off is in his implication that it now becomes difficult to find your apps to switch back to them. Look, if I'm playing Peggle and then use 4, or worst case 8, apps after switching out of Peggle - mentally I just won't even think to look in the task tray for it anymore. I just can't keep track of every app I've used in my brain. The tray will quickly let me switch back to my most recently used apps, which is really handy - but when I want to switch back to the middle of my Peggle game a week and 20 other app uses later I... and this will sound crazy... click the Peggle icon wherever it's located on my main screens. The author seems to think that the only way to resume an app is from the task tray, and that's simply not true.

Granted, I had some uncertainty about how this would work, too. But I grabbed a new iPhone and tried it out to see exactly how it works, rather than hopping on the interwebs and writing up an article with uninformed assumptions which then ended up on the front page of /.

Additionally, he goes on to say that developers have to explicitly add multitasking. While that's true for using the background services, my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong folks, as I have this on good authority but haven't actually tried it) is that for the base level of background freezing, which for a majority of apps is all that's really needed, all you have to do is recompile the app against iOS 4. It's not automagic, but it's really not so bad as the author implies. The worst bit about it is submitting to the app store, but it should be pretty painless to get to that point.

Granted, it's not true multitasking. Everyone knows that by now. But frankly, I'd rather the phone always be responsive and maintain its battery life than have true multitasking for the vast majority of the things that I do and have no desire to have to actively manage my apps (which contrary to the author's claims, I don't have to do). Maybe some day I'll change my mind on that. Maybe right now this level of multitasking isn't good enough for many people out there. And that's cool, we have options now - get one of the many excellent Android phones. But please don't write a blog post of inaccuracies.

There's a distinct difference between Flash Builder and Flex/Flex SDK. One is an open source application framework (Flex), the other is a standalone version of Eclipse running closed source plugins (Flash Builder, formerly Flex Builder, also available non-standalone).

I take issue with the fact that he's singling out Flash Builder when his complaints actually seem to be with Flex (not even the SDK per se, but the framework/API). That alone makes me question his credibility. I really regret clicking the link as I fear he's just a whiny traffic whore who wants people off of his (relatively new) lawn.

My own casual observation (and one that my friends seem to agree with) is that since Los Angeles introduced a similar law last year, it has in fact curbed such behavior. Prior to that it seemed to be a much bigger problem (as it was in previous cities I lived in). This isn't to say you don't still see it most of the times that you drive, but more frequently it's that one idiot on the cell phone during your trip rather than a whole road full of idiots on their cell phones.

Everyone I know has also made it a point to get a bluetooth headset to use while they're driving, as well. Your Los Angeles Mileage May Vary.

I just did a purely unscientific comparison of CPU usage comparing the native YouTube page and NeoSmart's HTML5 viewer. I tested a couple of different videos and did each one multiple times. I'm running Safari 4.0.3 and Flash 10.0.32.18 on OSX 10.4.11. I was consistently seeing 15-20% more CPU usage with the HTML5 viewer than with YouTube's Flash viewer.

Of course, when I downloaded the MP4 and played it in Quicktime it was much nicer to my CPU (but obviously not nearly as convenient).

What's even more problematic for all of those who want to see Flash die in a fire - Flash Player 10.1 should see performance improvements for playing video if I'm not mistaken (as well as in a number of other areas in regards to performance and resource usage). Meaning the HTML5 implementations will have that much more catching up to do from a performance perspective. (This has nothing to do with other concerns regarding Flash, like openness, security, etc. but the summary specifically called out performance)

You mileage certainly may vary (and please feel free to chime in with your results), but being that my laptop is my main machine - for my battery's sake, I'll stick with watching videos via Flash for now.

As someone who works on a large website targeted towards children which has both chat and UGC with various systems around who you can communicate with, whitelists, moderation, etc. this seems very unlikely to prove useful. Our weekly lists of banned phrases show just how creative people can be with regular, every day words and their ability to use them in ways which while using no established slang still very clearly come across as harassing/derogatory/sexual, etc - and as noted, the demographics here are young children (hence I don't think there's much value in "known player demographics"). I think the only way they could truly rate a game with real-time interaction with other players is based on what types of interactions you can have (which could still be tricky).

For instance - an online game of chess with no communication system, just the ability to make moves... probably pretty safe (though I'm sure someone will find a way to get creative with a horse and a queen). Whereas a game where you can run around and have the ability to duck - well, someone's gonna get tea bagged. But it all seems of limited usefulness, because very quickly you get to the point with your interactions where all bets are off - you'll end up with a very small segment of "safe" games with everything else being "at your own risk." Parents, et al are probably better off considering any game with online play "at your own risk."

But if Akamai loses a server, I don't have to repopulate the gigs of data they're hosting for me - it's not lost, it's just no longer on that particular server that died. That's exactly why I consider Akamai to be "the cloud" and why it doesn't side like Danger was. Especially with an infrastructure like Akamai or Google where things are geographically distributed, you just don't hear about servers dying, and you might not even hear about data centers dying (unless it places an unusually high burden somewhere and causes performance issues - but you don't hear about data loss as a result).

Personally, I always interpreted cloud computing as software that's running on a number of boxes of which the number can fluctuate without being meaningful (obviously there are performance implications depending on the overall load and number of boxes, but one box going down doesn't inherently bring down the system). One nice thing is these boxes can be geographically distributed as well - so when one data center gets nuked, the others are safe. Now, I realize geographic distribution isn't a requirement but even still, the press release says the data loss is due to a "server failure." Not a data center failure, but the apparent failure of a single server.

So is this really even "the cloud"? Does that mean that Geocities was "the cloud" or that every web host out there is "the cloud" because they've got my data running on a single machine? I certainly never interpreted it that way, but I'm no expert on the matter. It seems like if this data was in "the cloud" that it could have all been retrieved off of another machine somewhere. Perhaps for some customers those other machines might not yet be completely synced with very recent updates, but that would affect a small amount of data for a subset of customers.

I'd also recommend Moneyseize. Conceptually, very simple. However, the levels become insanely difficult. Similar to Star Guard you have unlimited lives, and since each level is only a single screen dying never sets you back significantly. Of course, it might sometimes take a few hundred tries to get past that single screen.

then is Flash/ActionScript really all that useful and attractive as an implementation language?

It's attractive to people that only know Flash/Actionscript and don't have the time/desire/skill to learn Objective-C.

I fear just what kind of pre-existing crapware this will enable on the iPhone.

There are already at least four apps on the store today that were built like this. This isn't Flash on the iPhone in any way - the apps are compiled into native iPhone applications. Does Apple have a rule somewhere that says all iPhone apps must be compiled with XCode?