Boz 1812's Blog

As we all know there has been a lot of debate surrounding Apple’s ipad. One of the biggies is Apples decision to snub flash support.

Here a few of my favourite excerpts from various articles i’ve been reading.

David Burton, Head of Innovation, Red Web:

“One of the problems I have with the iPad is that I can’t clearly see its usefulness. It’s not as powerful and multifunctional as a laptop or notebook. It’s too heavy to hold at arms length, too neck breaking to have it sit in my lap, and too awkward to prop up on a table for watching video. The screen is too bright for reading ebooks. On the other hand it’s not as personal as a phone, it’s not as handy, as small, as portable. I won’t be able to have it with me 24/7.

The other problem is that the iPad is a scaled up iPhone rather than a scaled down laptop. As such it runs on the same model as the iPhone. This means it will only run one app at a time. (Come on Apple, haven’t you seen what Android can do?) More importantly though, it means there’s a very closed, controlled and Apple owned approach to software development for the iPad.  Yes this is good for usability within applications, but in general users and developers will suffer: it limits creativity, chokes innovation, disregards choice, and is harmful to a healthy digital future.”

Paul Jamie Kidd, Creative Designer, Blue Ink Agency:

“We will shortly be entering a new html standard, HTML5. One thing HTML5 can do is replace Flash video players. Google has already begun testing the video tag in HTML5 with the h.264 video codec on YouTube so ultimately the iPad will be able to view YouTube videos.  Apple has been a known supporter for the HTML5 standard so that things can be coded for better performance across browsers and not require plugins, which potentially slow browsers down.”

Devin Coldewey from Techcrunch:

I feel like I should come to Flash’s defense, partially because I gave it one between the ribs last night, and partially because, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, “to see justice done is every man’s business.” Now here we have Steve Jobs saying in a WSJ interview that using Flash for video would reduce battery life from 10 hours to 1 hour, and suggests H.264 as an alternative. Let’s just take a moment to evaluate these plainly inflammatory statements.

First, we may as well be clear about this part: Flash isn’t the best on OS X, and probably would end up occupying a good portion of the CPU, resulting in lower battery life. Whether it’d knock eight or nine hours off this theoretical ten-hour battery is, of course, the most tenuous of speculation.

And why, we might reasonably ask, is Flash such a dog on OS X? Well, decoding 720p YouTube video can be either GPU-intensive or CPU-intensive. On Windows, Flash has tunnels to your video card to let its hugely parallel processors burst-decode a ton of information at a time. It can’t do that on OS X, from what I understand — mainly because Apple doesn’t want them to.

Here’s the thing: Apple doesn’t like Flash. I don’t particularly care for it, but it’s one of the foundational technologies of the web and can’t be dismissed as trivially replaceable, as Jobs would have us believe. But Apple doesn’t like it. That’s the key. They’ve got a grudge against Flash and Adobe and they’re going to pursue that to the bitter end. They could call up Adobe and say “Hey guys, Flash is blowing it in our OS, why don’t we get a few guys together and work it out?” But they won’t. They’d rather they had an excuse for railing at it and excluding it from the table. Flash is getting punched in the breadbasket here for no reason other than that Apple doesn’t want to play nice.

And  finally, Zaid Al-Asady, Interactive Creative/Art Director, Wieden+Kennedy London:

“Apple’s newly released device has come under a lot of criticism in the last few weeks but if one thing is for certain, it’s that the iPad alters the way in which interactive designers will do their job.

The iPad can be viewed in both landscape and portrait mode meaning any website design should be adaptive, with the ability to work in both formats. More of an emphasis will be placed on fluid layouts and style sheets that can easily work both ways.

The interface is fully touchscreen meaning that many of the hover/ rollover effects designers use become unnecessary. It also means that hiding information or functionality to be revealed on rollover will no longer work. From a usability point of view, elements on the page will need to be larger than they appear on websites due to size and accuracy of fingertips compared to mouse pointers.

Many people consider one major drawback to be the lack of Flash, but with the power of DHTML, Google’s backing of HTML5 as well as Adobe’s Flash CS5 iPhone/iPad publisher there is no reason to fear.

These may all sound restrictive but the benefits far outweigh the negatives. If done correctly, designers are able to create stunning graphical applications and sites that utilise the powerful multitouch platform and offer a smooth and enjoyable interaction experience for the user.”