Because the Surface Pro 3 costs even more than an iPad Air, though a Transformer Book or Nextbook is cheaper. And there are plenty of applications that are on iOS but not Windows, such as games and messaging applications. If the game you want to play is exclusive to iOS, or the family member with whom you wish to communicate uses a proprietary instant messaging application that is available only for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, then a Surface Pro isn't going to be the best choice.

True, Kindle Fire is a tablet running the Fire OS distribution of Android. But I think tlhIngan was contrasting tablets with the e-ink Kindle readers, which are more like the Nook Simple Touch.

Except some people don't have the PC. Instead of engaging in productive activities that work better on a PC, they do without. One user predicted that this would happen in five years, but it's happening now.

Even a 10" laptop like the "netbooks" that were in fashion from 2008 to 2012?

To complete this analogy, someone who can use a car most of the time and only occasionally needs to do these "tons of things" can rent a truck, such as a moving truck from U-Haul or a pickup truck from The Home Depot. Is there a comparable PC rental ecosystem?

Mapper chips were invented for Video Chess but weren't actually used in the final release, which was squeezed into 4096 bytes. (source)

My source states that a checkerboard has 64 squares, like a chessboard.

That's what I was trying to avoid.

Many of the mouse-based ones have. But the keyboard-based ones, like the falling object parkour game Tetris'd , wouldn't port very well to an input device that's a flat sheet of glass. I haven't seen a smartphone with a built-in gamepad other than perhaps the outdated, overpriced Xperia Play.

A lot of Flash animations are likewise sprite-based. Do you know of any good timeline-based sprite animation editors for DHTML or HTML5 Canvas?

Thank you. Now a follow-up question: Are there any good authoring tools for HTML5 canvas animations that aren't pay-per-month? If so, which?

I was trying to avoid causing the XY problem by asking for tools to perform a step toward the wrong goal. Asking "What are usable authoring tools for animated SVG?" isn't helpful when animated SVG itself isn't a viable technology. So instead, I first asked for the right goal (what tech) and followed up by asking for the right step (what authoring tools). My question in full could have been phrased more formally as follows: "What is the most viable technology to replace SWF, and what are usable authoring tools for said technology whatever it might be?" What is the correct etiquette for asking a question contingent on another question?

You appear to claim that both WebGL and Flash are "a giant security hole [that] should be avoided like the plague". If this is true, then which technology should be used instead for two- and three-dimensional vector animation?

I have the feeling you're about to say "native code". The problem is that native code all too often ends up being made for a platform other than the ones you have available to you.

Edge Animate exists, but you can't buy it. You have to rent it on Creative Butt.

By emulating Flash Player 11.2 for Linux in a PC emulator perhaps?

Which means "the appropriate application for the urltype" needs to exist for the user's platform. Not everyone wants to have to make 14 different apps for 14 different platforms, not to mention that several platforms require a long and involved developer pre-approval process. For example, the Flash Lite player in Internet Channel was the only publicly available game development environment for Wii before that console was cracked.

So what tools would you recommend for building these without, say, having to type all the (x, y) coordinates into a script file? I haven't seen any animation stuff in Inkscape, unless there was some recent huge update of which I'm not aware.

Neither does HTML5 if you abuse onmouseover. The lack of hover is completely orthogonal to the SWF vs. HTML debate.