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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Steve Jobs speaks about Flash

Gavin Greenwalt said:
No. I would say historically Steve Jobs has been really good at commercializing products that lots of people know is the future but can't seem to find a company to property implement or market to a wide audience.

MP3 players weren't very common but millions had concluded they were the future long before the iPod and iTunes.

Smartphones and mobile web were were used by millions before the iPhone. The iPhone just made it easier and had a decent web browser.

Tablets aren't a new phenomenon.

AppleTV was a crappy implementation of Windows Media Center, XBMC or a host of other solutions.

I can't think of a single product that Apple has released since the GUI (From XEROX) which was really surprising or innovative and didn't emerge out of an obvious industry shift towards a technology. What distinguishes apple I don't believe is their competence so much as the lack there of in their competitors.
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Some interesting points. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the first but the Newton was, I think, one of the three original PDA's. I'm curious now which was first. If my memory is correct the Newton was born under Jobs and Gil Amelio killed it. It has to be one of the biggest blunders ever.

Apple seems to have had a few definite phases in it's maturity. For the longest time, it was perceived as a computer company due to the Macintosh. In the '90's Jobs would have you believe that the OS was the cornerstone of the company, making them a software company. Now it seems that the thing they accel at most, and always, has been industrial design. They are a designer of world class solutions.

You seem to suggest that what they do best is marketing. Maybe I'm a dolt, or they are so good at it that their marketing is almost invisible, but I don't see it as that remarkable. What I do think is when you are so good at design that you are perceived as consistently fulfilling a unique consumer need ahead of the curve that the zealous devotees just come with the territory.
 
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Scott Crawley said:
If my memory is correct the Newton was born under Jobs and Gil Amelio killed it. It has to be one of the biggest blunders ever.
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It's the other way around, the newton was Amelio's pet project but when Jobs took power in 1997 he scrapped the newton with pretty much apple's entire product line in favor of a much more streamlined 4 computer model.
a Pro portable and pro desktop along with a consumer portable and consumer desktop.
 
Scott Crawley said:
Some interesting points. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the first but the Newton was, I think, one of the three original PDA's. I'm curious now which was first.
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Well. Microsoft already had already released its first pen based extensions for Windows as a response to PenPoint.

So that follows the trend pretty well.

Existing product innovates. Microsoft enters to compete. After years of mucking around Apple finally enters when the hardware is actually ready for mass commercialization.

Everyone always raved about the iPhone's amazing capacitive touch screens. There's a reason everyone was using resistive touch screens prior to the iPhone. That was when it was just finally becoming affordable. Take a note at the huge swarm of tablets coming out this year. It's not because Apple released the iPad. It's because Nvidia finally developed an affordable chip capable of driving the demands of a mass appeal tablet.

One part of Steve Job's business acumen has been to develop products for future technology so that he's ready to release as soon as the hardware is ready. (Ignoring the desktop where it lags behind by 6-12 months or so).
 
can purely html5 create this?

http://www.ecodazoo.com/

if so, then html5 will have what it takes under the hood to completely replace flash. if not then, perhaps it will replace garden variety interactivity and offer a better cross browser markup and scripted consistency, but otherwise it would not offer the tools that many of the very most creative technology folks will desire.

of course, flash on mobile has already lost big time. adobe fell asleep on that one and will have to prove itself (if possible) as it did on personal computers ten+ years ago.

regardless of your opinion, make sure you take the time to really explore and enjoy the site.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
(Ignoring the desktop where it lags behind by 6-12 months or so).
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Are you talking hardware or software? Hardware, yes. Software, absolutely not. OSX brought about the quartz accelerated desktop that mixed 2D and 3D and pushed more GUI responsibility to the graphics card resulting in much better performance. Windows didn't get this till MUCH later.

Apple unified the coreAudio system and many of the core foundation libraries which really provide a MUCH MORE stable interaction with the OS. I do not miss the days of DirectX or ASIO or any of the other methods used in the Windows world (And add to that ALSA and LADSPA from the linux world as well).

Add to this the new parallel processing additions of snow-leopard and grand central, they are clearing charging forward with multi-processor aids to help developers utilize those resources more efficiently.

I use Windows, Linux and OSX all the time. I love the power of Linux, but it doesn't have all the best professional applications I love to use. It also can require a bit more time to keep going. OSX bridges the world between Linux and Windows and for me personally has all the benefits and not as many of the detractors of each. It does have them, it's not perfect, but for me it is THE BEST stable operating system I have ever used.

(I also use Sun Microsystem Solaris machines every day at work. They are THE most reliable machines I have ever used, but DAMN are they slow! They are older.)

Some people are willing to trade performance for reliability. I have for MANY years. Now that I have SO many projects I am working on, and since CPU is not always my limiting factor (as I am not constantly rendering or converting everyday) I happily use my mac. If anything, I would want to add a LINUX render farm to my setup if I get bogged down.
 
Adam Clark said:
can purely html5 create this?

http://www.ecodazoo.com/
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That site is pretty cool.

As for HTML5, yes it can create that. Or I guess it would be better to say it should be able to create that, as I have not seen anything of that level done in HTML5 yet.

FWIW, Apple has still not fully closed the door on FLASH. Jobs says they are still waiting for Adobe to show them a FLASH that meets the resource and performance expectations they have. Adobe has been working feverishly to improve FLASH for mobile platforms and make it more optimized. Not only due to Apple's stance, but also at the request of Google. Adobe is set to show off an updated FLASH running on Android here in the next week or so. I hope it works out and I hope Apple takes notice. I would like to have Flash on my iPad...

As for the cross-compiler for using FLASH to build stand-alone apps. Well, that's not going to happen on the iPhone. I can completely see the reasoning behind this as we move to iPhone OS 4. A cross compiler is not going to give the control and performance required to do this right by the way Apple has implemented their multitasking. Anyone here who is in the iPhone developer program can download the SDK4 beta and see for themselves. IMO, FLASH makes a poor and inefficient choice for independent app delivery. It's an interpreted environment... To the people whining about "closed development" on the iPhone. That's not true. Apple uses GCC for their compiler and all their own APIs are exposed and well documented and they're free. You don't have to use Interface Builder or Xcode to create iPhone apps. Apple did not lock out FLASH specifically in regards to cross compilers. They locked out ALL cross compilers.
 
Adam Clark said:
interesting. i didn't know that it offered oop/class capabilities beyond some special audio/video tech and of course javascript. i'll look more into it.
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Apple has been showing some demo widgets for iAd that are pretty sophisticated; 3D menus and navigation controls, all HTML5 based. For me, the current limiting factor of HTML5 is the lack of broad support and the differences in interpretation between browser platforms. It's HTML so the way Microsoft interprets HTML5 parameters and directives is different than how Google or Apple does. Microsoft is doing quite a bit to support HTML5 -- they are incorporating GPU acceleration most graphics functions. Pretty cool, IMO.
 
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