Pixel Doubling looks terrible but for a lot of apps it can actually be better unless the app is designed to be resolution independent right from the start. Sure you can just scaling any vector drawing and fonts to full the larger screen, but some programs rely on drawing over bitmaps (for instance) in a pixel perfect way. Trying to do any kind of intelligent scaling is going to ruin the look of these apps. I can understand why Apple did it this way.

This is only true if you are an iOS Registered Developer which is easy to set up but will cost you $US99 per year. Personally I find this a small price to pay since XCode itself is free whereas compilers used to cost hundreds of dollars, but it annoys other people.

Have you actually tried one? They have bigger problems than the touch screen, the one I tried was under-powered with an incredibly laggy UI. It did play flash, but couldn't keep up with full screen video, the browser was slow, and the apps didn't work very well since it emulated the standard Android buttons with onscreen controls. At best it was 1/10th of an iPad at 1/4 the price.

Assuming that they aren't total assholes...

What do you base this assumption on?

Based on my experience, at least 80% of the home routers in use still have the default credentials unchanged since they were unpacked. That's a lot of the population vulnerable.

I am pretty sure it is cell phones - I believe [citation needed] that the iPhone (for one) does this as part of the anonymized data sent back to Apple. Google's database is probably kept up to date in a similar fashion.

What scares me the most is that to get the location they demonstrate a plausible way to access the settings on your router (if you use the default credentials.) If I was evil (or more evil) I wouldn't care about the location, I would just changed the router's DNS settings and redirect all the traffic through a server of my choice.

Ostensibly whatever it is Valve is going to be revealing at E3 is going to be a game, a new game perhaps or something like that.

+1 Insightful

Have you published your experiments anywhere? I have done some experiments with the audio tag and have been disappointed with the way it handles short programatically triggered sounds. It works (baring bug, like in Chrome) but I would love to see a better way.

Correct. If Adobe had open sourced Flash right from the beginning and provided a free dev environment it may have been ubiquitous by now instead of being a glorified video codec. But the other reason Flash applications haven't taken off is simple - nobody whose opinion matters wants them to!

Microsoft is terrified by anything that would let it's locked-in customer base easily migrate to another desktop OS. Apple doesn't care so much, but would much prefer applications be developed specifically for MacOSX (and guards the iPhone like Fort Knox). The linux desktop people are busy with other stuff and distrust Adobe. The application developers would maybe like to use Flash (or maybe not) but are hindered by insane licensing fees. The only people (apart from Adobe) who really want Flash are Google, who stand to make more money if applications are pushed out onto the web. Google are the only ones who push out Flash with their browser, and include good Flash support in their mobile OS.

Adobe really tried to get people to develop whole applications in Flash, but I could never see a compelling reason to do this. HTML works well enough for most things (even more with HTML5), anything more demanding is maybe not a good candidate for implementing as a web-based application. Where is the Flash facebook or imdb? They don't exist because they wouldn't provide anything more than what we already have. Where is the cross-platform Flash email client? Nobody cares.

I don't mean to dump on Flash too much - it serves its purpose. Even with HTML5, Flash will still be used for games, advertising, and maybe video for years to come. But it will never be the all-encompassing platform that Adobe wants it to be.

And the last interesting point - iPad sales dropped down to ~10% after first day sales.

Are you saying that Apple will sell as many iPads in the next 10 days as it did on the huge first day? I don't think Apple has a problem with that.

Agreed. I work in a "serious Microsoft shop" and we have just migrated our projects to VS2008. Experience has taught us that although the Microsoft Dev environments are of high quality, for the first 12 months there will be service packs and patches. We do not want to have to migrate our whole team and our projects every 3 months just to keep up.

That said, I am looking forward to using VS2010 eventually. I couldn't care less about .NET but the new C++ language features are neat.

Er... we have multiple incompatible graphic formats on web pages, and nobody says much about it anymore. Once upon the time, people were concerned about GIF vs. JPEG vs. PNG, and now it's apparently such a non-issue that you don't even realize that web pages aren't all using JPEG.

For a start, GIF and PNG are used quite differently to JPEG - there are good reasons why multiple image formats exist. All videos are pretty much the same, unless someone comes up with a codec for low-colour animation or something.

Now imagine if Google (for instance) has come up with a fantastic new image format - GPEG. Its great (10% better compression), but only Chrome supports it. Further more, imagine Chrome doesn't support GIF due to licensing costs). Sites that want to work in all browsers now need to encode images in two different formats and use browser fallbacks to display the correct version. It may not matter for your blog, but it is a major hassle for sites like flickr and wikipedia. Many sites wouldn't bother and just look bad on minority browsers, or maybe even rely on Flash to display images on all systems.

Video and audio are like this today. It is a bit of a nightmare and is holding back HTML5 media adoption. Safari won't play Theora, Firefox won't play h264 (and probably never will due to licensing issues), Chrome plays everything but has bugs in some formats, IE plays nothing currently. It is a mess.

Out of curiosity, what are these better ways of storing photos than JPEG, and in which ways are they better?

I was thinking of jpeg2000, but other formats exist.

Do you also remember what a pain it was when some browsers (IE) didn't support PNG while others (Firefox, etc) had good support. That made no-one happy.

Now imagine if IE only supported GIF and Firefox only support PNG, with no universal fallback that they both could view. That is the situation with audio and video in HTML5.

Yes, you can re-encode the files you want to serve multiple times (I do this for the audio files on my site) but this is a real pain in the neck. It's bad enough doing it twice - are we going to have to re-encode everything three times now? Even worse is if you do not have access to the original raw file - if you only have an h264 encoded file, re-encoding it to theora or VP8 is going to look terrible.

Put it this way: back in the day before Flash video became popular some sites used Quicktime for video, some used Real, and some used WMV. Only a few sites bothered to encode multiple versions, even though it would be possible to have automatic fallback using scripting (I never saw a site that would do this, they all made the user chose manually). Once Flash came along with its single condec, it only took months for the major sites to switch even though the quality of FLV at the time was not as good as Quicktime (for instance). It was better to have a single universal codec even if it was not quite head of the pack - the advantage of ubiquity outweighed the technical limitations.

If you were creating a site today, what would you do? Encode multiple versions of your videos or just use Flash? The iPad (and similar devices) may change the game but it is not certain how much impact they will have.