Silverlight 5: Back from the dead?

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

At its recent Professional Developer Conference Microsoft’s Bob Muglia signalled a major change of strategy for the company’s Silverlight technology. When first introduced Silverlight was intended to become a near universal cross-platform web runtime like Flash. Now Muglia revealed that Microsoft saw HTML5 as the future for universal in-browser development while Silverlight was being repositioned as a native application development platform for Windows Phone 7 devices. Unsurprisingly, most pundits saw this as an admission of defeat, with our own Jon Honeyball asking: “Silverlight RIP?”

Yesterday, just over a month later, Scott Guthrie announced the “Firestarter” launch of the new Silverlight 5 beta under the slogan “the future of Silverlight starts now”. So what’s going on? (more…)

How Adobe defied Apple to produce superb iPad magazines

Friday, November 12th, 2010

There’s a lot of excitement in the world of publishing regarding the massive potential of the new tablet market. The biggest news at the recent Adobe MAX 2010 was the official announcement of Adobe’s upcoming Digital Publishing platform for delivering rich, interactive electronic magazines using the Creative Suite design tools and InDesign in particular.

The reason for the excitement is obvious. Up until now the internet has been a disaster for the big publishers, as they’ve effectively been forced to cut their margins, and occasionally throats, by giving away content for free online. Now with the arrival of the tablet, it’s possible for publishers to provide a far richer, handheld, book-like, reading experience. The end user is happy because it’s a fundamental advance on both traditional print and web browsing, and the publisher is delighted because here at last is the chance to charge for content while taking full advantage of the internet in terms of its global audience and  minimal production costs. (more…)

Adobe MAX 2010: HTML5 and Flash

Friday, October 29th, 2010

Just how committed is Adobe to HTML5?

It’s a serious concern. Adobe is not only the developer of the main professional HTML authoring tool, Dreamweaver, but also of the Flash platform which promises to take the browser beyond HTML into richer, more powerful territory. Clearly there’s a possible conflict of interest here – a point I made at the launch of the latest CS5 suites when the page-oriented Web Standard suite was dropped in a blatant attempt to push designers towards the Flash-centred Web Professional suite.

Unfairly promoting Flash is one danger, but far worse is the possibility that Adobe would want to hold HTML5 back. This suspicion dawned with the limited HTML5 capabilities in Dreamweaver CS5 and was reinforced by Steve Jobs’ attack on Flash which ended: “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

There’s a real danger here that HTML5 and Flash could be driven into opposing camps in the war between Apple and Adobe, and you really don’t want to bet against HTML. Based on the latest Adobe MAX 2010, it looks like Adobe is well aware of the potential trap and has acted accordingly.

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Steve Jobs’ anti-Android manifesto dissected

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

As you’ve probably seen, Steve Jobs made a personal appearance on Apple’s earnings call last night in which he denounced Android and Google’s “open” approach. Here’s a complete transcript of that four-minute section of the call, with some of my own interjections.

“Google loves to characterise Android as open”

“Google loves to characterise Android as open, and iOS and iPhone as closed. We find this a bit disingenuous, and clouding the real difference between our two approaches. The first thing most of us think about when we hear the word ‘open’ is Windows, which is available on a variety of devices.”

I don’t believe there’s a single person in the world for whom the word “open” instinctively suggests Windows. Clearly, Jobs is trying to finesse the terms of the argument right at the outset, so he can focus on what he wants to talk about – a theme we might call “choice versus simplicity” – and ignore the rest of the issues that relate to openness. Coming one sentence after he’s accused Google of being disingenuous, that’s a bit rich. Indeed, Google VP Andy Rubin has responded with a terse tweet indicating one significant implication of “open” that Jobs overlooks – freely available source code.

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Apple vs Adobe: some surprising statistics

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

I recently came across a very interesting bit of analysis on the Macworld site. According to a survey by Net Markets based on usage share across 160 million unique visitors spread over 40,000 websites:

“Apple’s iOS mobile operating system is now the third most popular platform on the internet, with a share nearly six times larger than Android’s… more than enough to shove Linux off its perch as the third-place operating system on the web.”

Now that really does sound impressive, especially in the context of some quotes from Vince Vizzaccaro, a Net Applications vice president, regarding overall mobile share and the iOS percentage: “Mobile’s growth curve is strong and mobile is becoming quite a phenomenon on the internet… That’s massive when you think about it… we’re seeing iOS totally dominate the market on the web.”

So just what are these amazing figures?

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Apple iBooks and the top-shelf chart toppers

Friday, September 10th, 2010

“We view apps different [sic] than books or songs, which we do not curate,” said the new iPhone App Store submission guidelines issued by Apple yesterday. “If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song.”

It seems several “publishers” have taken Apple at its word. At the top of the iBooks paid-for chart right now is Hot and Steamy: Sizzling Sex Stories, with Hot and Steamy: Sexual Fantasies at number 12 and Erotic Threesomes at number 27.

The free books chart, meanwhile, has the none-too-subtle A Taste Of Things To Cum at number two, nestled rather conspicuously between Winnie-the-Pooh and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

It seems, therefore, that Apple iPads and iPhones are people’s preferred medium for a titillating read. Certainly if you look at the Amazon bestsellers or the Waterstones chart, there’s nothing in the top ten you’d be embarrassed about reading on the bus (with the possible exception of Tony Blair’s autobiography).

It was Steve Jobs, remember, who once defended the Apple walled garden by claiming that the iPad delivered “freedom from porn”. How much longer, I wonder, is he going to put up with A Taste Of Things To Cum sullying his charts?

Meet the magical irePhone 4

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

I’ve invented a new smartphone. It’s called the irePhone 4 and it has a ten-hour standby time, which it wiles away by murdering kittens and sending lewd pictures to nuns. Very occasionally it will explode. Despite this, I’m confidently predicting that sales of the irePhone will be stratospheric, because I’m pretty certain the internet will have exhausted itself of apocalyptic hysteria by the time it launches.

I’m sad to say I missed Act One of the iPhone 4 show, though I believe there was clapping. Just in case anybody missed the hijinks, it turns out that once the clapping subsided people discovered their iPhone 4 drops calls, which is a bit like dropping grenades except nobody gets hurt, it doesn’t matter all that much, and we only care because Apple makes people sooooo mad.

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The fundamental differences between Flash and HTML (and the real reasons that Steve Jobs wants to kill it)

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Recently I’ve been making the case that Steve Jobs’ refusal to allow Flash near the iPhone, iPod and iPad isn’t an inconsequential squabble but rather a fundamental attack on the very future of web-based design and development.

At first sight, the argument may well look perverse. After all, everyone knows that Flash is a proprietary and binary add-on format for web pages that has led to some appalling design excesses and is increasingly, and rightly, being flushed out of common web page usage (as when Flash rollovers were replaced by CSS). OK the format has currently found a niche delivering video, but really it’s an outdated technology ready to be put out to pasture by the brand-new, open standard, video-enabled, “Flash-killing” HTML5.

In this version of the story, Steve Jobs is simply doing everyone a favour by speeding the take-up of HTML5 and the inevitable purging of Flash from the Web. However underlying Job’s anti-Flash argument and most people’s thinking on the subject is a mistaken assumption (or carefully calculated deception in the case of Jobs). Most people assume that HTML will inevitably evolve to be able to do everything that Flash can; simply make HTML and the browser more powerful and the need for add-ons like Flash evaporates. Why do it in the player with a closed format when you can do it in the browser with open standards?

In fact Flash is a fundamentally different technology to HTML and can do things that HTML can’t and never will.

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The benefits of new improved Flash

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

There’s a lot of debate at the moment about the future of the web and it’s clear that in many ways we’re standing at a crossroads. According to Adobe, “the next chapter of the web” is Flash and it is pushing the format hard with its latest Web Premium CS5 suite (arguably too hard).

According to Steve Jobs and Apple however, the web needs to be washed clean of this proprietary plague and the future belongs to HTML 5.

So which is it to be? Flash or vanilla? Adobe or Apple? Player or browser?

Based on the iPhone and iPad’s phenomenal sales, it’s clear that there are plenty of users happy to go with Jobs’ no-Flash option. After all, apart from video, is Flash really that integral to today’s web experience? It seems a very small price to pay for such undeniably brilliant hardware.

However, as the old adverts didn’t quite put it: “before you buy, have you considered the benefits of new improved Flash?”

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Apple v Adobe: some lessons from history

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

With Steve Jobs’ recent attack on Flash and Kevin Lynch’s response, the Apple-Adobe war is escalating. Jobs’ post claims to make the case against Flash purely on objective technology grounds, but as Darien Graham-Smith’s in-depth response shows, “Six reasons why Steve Jobs is wrong on Flash”, that case is far from convincing and the truth is that Jobs’ antipathy to Adobe is deeply personal and rooted in history.

To understand why, it’s important to realise that this isn’t the first time that Apple has declared war on Adobe. The big difference is that previously Apple was right…

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