On a mission? Nah, most blogs only take me 10-15 mins 😉

Interested by your claim that most of the design and development community have gone over to the Mac. That’s the “design-and-development” community, right? I’d say there are quite a few developers on all platforms. But the Mac has always been the visual designer’s machine of choice, for historical and software reasons.

Agree about Adobe, and well put.

I think it’s Apple’s aim to rid themselves of Flash by reducing its potential as a development target. Given the massive market share of the iPhone, developers will simply have to not develop anything in Flash to support them.

I welcome this simply because Flash is proprietary. But if the device manufacturer dictates that certain technology is or isn’t usable, and consumers still choose this, then that’s their call. iPad customers will choose a device, knowing that it won’t support a number of features of web sites out there.

The sad thing about this, though, is that what Apple takes away with one hand it doesn’t give with the other. Apple rejected the use of patent-unencumbered Ogg Theora video and opted, like Google and Nokia, for the H.264 format. However, Apple only promotes QuickTime video on its own web site (QuickTime being a wrapper, like AVI, which then contains the encoded video stream, just as Flash does it). So, it “supports” HTML 5, but won’t support Theora without a plug-in.

Video will be the new holy war, not operating system or mobile device or computing platform. There’s some nice commentary about this here: http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/01/25/html5-video-25-h-264-reach-vs-95-ogg-theora-reach/ . With royalties to be paid for the use of H.264, smaller content producers will naturally opt for the free alternative, which will then be much harder (or impossible) to access using mobile devices that don’t support that format.

Suffice it to say, if you buy an Apple device that can only install software through the Apple Store, you give up your right to choose what you use, view and read. You end up consuming the content, ideas and suggestions of those organisations powerful and rich enough to control the vertical and the horizontal.

Video isn’t the only aspect of control going on here. No-one can dispute Google being the king of search, yet Apple chose Bing for its mobile devices. Why? Was it in their customer’s interest? Why not Yahoo, who arguably has a better search engine than Microsoft..?