Comments on: iPad Flash decision: bad blast from the past

By: Seth Wade

Seth Wade — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:26:31 +0000

Haven’t you see that touch screen Eee pc? It’s also cheaper by 30$!!

http://www.google.com/products?q=touch+screen+eee+pc

By: Facebook friend

Facebook friend — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:53:54 +0000

I’ll likely get one for the office for development purposes, even though I’ll secretly loathe it. But if it its jailbroken, it could have a lot of potential. We’ll see.

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:53:37 +0000

Those restrictions are definitely going to be their biggest adoption hurdles. Beyond of course the fact that tablets have tried and failed, like, 3 generations now.

I doubt I’ll ever get one, for the reasons laid out at the start of the article. For being a tech guy, I’m pretty anti-gadget. I guess the knowledge just lets me see through the BS and consider how a given device would actually help make my life easier.

By: Facebook friend

Facebook friend — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:53:15 +0000

I can almost understand their desire to keep things tied down in a mobile phone market, so that the phone doesn’t get viruses and is stable enough to always make emergency calls, etc., but on a tablet I find it completely unacceptable to have those kinds of restrictions.

Maybe once Gen 2 is out or it’s jailbroken, I’ll consider it. I love my … See MoreAppleTV now that it runs boxee, otherwise it would have been an utterly worthless purchase, doing nothing except playing a few small videos and some MP3s on my TV.

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:52:27 +0000

All true, and I’m sure geeks everywhere are saying the same things. I know I am.

But keep in mind that Apple focuses on the non-techy crowd, most of whom don’t have the first clue how to break closed systems. In that sense, the market reaction is far more important than what a couple of propeller heads like us would do (’cause we’d do it regardless).

By: Facebook friend

Facebook friend — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:51:50 +0000

Agreed entirely. In the meantime, people are doing things like writing a SWF parser in pure javascript just to get around the restriction: http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon

Unfortunately for Apple (and fortunately for us), they don’t get to dictate what people will and won’t view on their computers, phones, etc., no matter how hard they try.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:42:21 +0000

So the goal is to force more App development? Instead of just “browsing the web,” per se, they are using apps to do the stuff that’s left by holes of Flash?

I guess I can see that, but a hardware vendor going up against an install base of any software package is a tall order. Then, when you consider the prevalence of the Flash technology, it seems ridiculous.

So it’s certainly possible that’s what they were thinking, but that seems even more foolish than my hypothesis, IMO.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:46:20 +0000

I disagree. I think a goal of “let’s push HTML5″ would be a nice lofty excuse, for sure, but I think the real decision here came from the bottom line.

What happens, when app developers decide they’re tired of the hoops they’ve been jumping through to have their work listed in the App Store? What happens when instead they simply decided to do their work in Flash, and make it freely accessible via the web? App Store profits tank.

I think the issue here is a lot more to do with Apple trying to squeeze out any means by which the App Store can be effectively subverted at scale. Sure, a few devs out there will use HTML5. But they’ll be largely ignored, and the 95% will continue to go to the App Store to – and here’s the key – *purchase* their software.