As another said, you could have freeform placement.

Though my comment was more pointing out that Apple had a device with a "grid of icons" long before 2002. I've seen many people trying to point out phones and devices that had this a year to a few years before Apple, yet they ignore the Newton which was many years before that.

Now this isn't saying that another device didn't have a grid of icons before the Newton, just pointing out that Apple had one before the device(s) people are trying to use as prior art.

And Apple had the Newton MessagePad a decade before that.

http://www.thocp.net/hardware/pictures/pda/apple_newton_sml.jpg

Except the 5 and a half year old mac that I have runs the latest Xcode just fine.

iPod Touch I can see having to replace every few years.. but an additional $200 every few years should be insignificant if your product is making money. If its not making money, then either stop developing it, or stop complaining.

Agreed. Admittedly there are significant changes from Xcode 3 that can easily turn one off to it, but if you actually read the Xcode 4 transition guide and put in a bit of time with it, its actually far better then Xcode 3 was.

VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion are not valid solutions for all enterprise use.

Apple needs to allow OSX Server to run virtualized on non-Apple branded hardware so that it can be run under a bare-metal hypervisor like VMWare vSphere.

Yeah, I know there's Parallels Server, but that only runs on Apple branded hardware and doesn't even come close to the capabilities of vSphere.

OSX Server running on a HA-FT vSphere cluster would be, basically speaking, amazing.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/18/exclusive-woz-misquoted-almost-every-app-that-i-have-is-bette/

Woz says he gave the De Telegraaf reporter a lengthy demonstration of voice commands on iOS and Android, pointed out that Android offered the ability to say "Navigate to Joe's Diner," and suggested that Apple would catch up through its purchases of Siri and Poly9. According to Steve, that's about it -- he says he'd "never" say that Android was better than iOS, and that "Almost every app I have is better on the iPhone." Woz did say he lightly prognosticated that Android would become more popular "based on what I've read," but that he expects Android "to be a lot like Windows... I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy."

So in the next year and a half will we expect to see WebM 1.0, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.1 and 2.2?

I can see it now, not being able to watch video on all sites because they use "2.1" and the hardware decoder in your Android phone only supports 1.6 even though it was just released yesterday.

Seriously, is Google the company that we want attempting to control a video standard? Sure they have a lot of smart developers over there, and so far I'm not convinced they can hold back and not change things too often. Is WebM as is really considered release ready by Google? After the decoder is put in a bunch of hardware will they all of a sudden come out with "Don't use that version any more, use this new one, its better. Oh, and you have to re-encode all your video."

Just my thoughts.

This works pretty well under the released version of Safari for OSX 10.6. In fact, in some of the samples where the flash version is provided as well, the Flash ones use more CPU then the HTML5 ones.

There is a bit of degradation in some of the graphics, but hey its better then not seeing the graphics (ok, that really depends ... if its an ad and you prefer not to see it ... whatever).

Now the question is, why can't Adobe add a feature to the Flash authoring tool to just output the HTML5 and whatever is needed, that smokescreen does in the browser?

From some of the samples it would seem like you could just "drop in" the converted version with minimal loss of quality and reach a much larger audience.

I would still prefer Flash, for the most part, go away, and this won't help that too much (initially anyway). But it seems like this would be a good way for many web sites to start using HTML5 now, while support and implementations mature, as well as giving all the Flash devs time to learn to write natively in HTML5.

... and yet they continue to work for him. And his company continues to make massive amounts of money.

I guess in that case I wouldn't mind so much being a rapidly dying, mentally, emotionally and physically deteriorated ruin of a human being, bent on control fueled by his narcissism trying to slap together a legacy pyramid for himself.

First, this is just a really stupid argument. I'm not sure why people think this is a good idea. Adobe is obviously out for profit, you think they want flash on the iDevices because its better for their users? Yeah, keep living in your happy little world.

Next, the CS products get more bloated and slower with each release (with the exception of the 64bit version of PS for OSX in CS5, of course not many plugins yet support 64bit so you have to run it in 32bit mode until they do). I believe they're even now using AIR for their UI.

There's really no reason why many professionals would really need to upgrade anyway. Many are still using CS3. Yeah, PS in CS5 introduces the new "Content Aware Fill" which is pretty nice, but its not flawless and it just makes something that people have been doing for years easier (in some cases its still easier to do it the old fashioned way). There's nothing that you can do in CS5 that you can't do in an earlier version. with exception of loading really large image files. Of course, now that CS5 has been released for OSX that ability is out there. If CS6 didn't come out for mac (which would cost Adobe a lot in lost revenue), I'm sure the creative professionals would be more then content staying on an older version (at least until Apple released a competing app).

And how is this Apple's problem?

I would say, and I believe many would agree, that the normal "user" doesn't care about or even understand what "open" really means. In fact, from reading many comments on various sites I would say that many "geeks" don't even understand what open means or how its applied to the various phones. Regardless, Apple has a single phone (granted with 3 revisions thus far), on a single US network. Android is available on multiple networks and more importantly, Verizon. I know many people that would love to get an iPhone but refuse to simply because they can't have it on Verizon. They complain that they won't be able to use mobile-to-mobile minutes talking to their friends and wont get unlimited sms/mms to their friends. Not one person I know has ever mentioned that they don't want an iPhone because its not "open".

Android phones are a great alternative to the iPhone on other networks so people will buy it. But to say that Apple is "losing" because they aren't open, I can't see how that can be completely proven as Apple recently announced they surpassed 1 million sold iPads (which run the same "closed" operating system).

As others have pointed out, you also have to count the iPads and iPod Touches as they all share the same OS and allow non-at&t users to have the "iPhone" experience without having to switch to at&t (or get non-contracted service on their iPad 3G's)

But everyone seems to think all the current flash apps out there will already run perfectly on their multi-touch device. I don't have any numbers or specifics since I try to avoid any of the social media games, but how many of them will work perfectly on a mobile device touch screen? Its a serious question. I've never played any of them.

As Jobs pointed out, if any of these games or apps would have to be rewritten with touch in mind, why not write them in a more open format (html5) rather then keeping them bound to a closed plugin?

What you don't like to go to a website to only be presented with 30 seconds of intro animation?

Or in my case, a big empty page with a box in the middle that says "Flash".

Everyone always says this. Can you please name a few of these things?

HTML5 video tag can host browser-native video. There are many complex game examples showing that HTML5 can be used for games. Many of the full-flash-crap-pages currently only use flash to do some fancy (annoying) fades and transitions. I would love to lose that, but I believe HTML5 or CSS3 animations or whatever can do that.

What else is there?