constructive nonconformist

Will Mobile Safari be the new IE?

Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984 and in 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone. The case has been made that with the Macintosh, Apple squandered its technological lead by maximizing profits when it should have been maximizing market share. The $99 iPhone is why 2007 won’t be like 1984.

According to TUAW, Boingo Wireless reported that for January through May of 2009 “89.2% of all mobile devices accessing Boingo’s airport hotspots” were iPhones.

TUAW: iPhone dominates Boingo airport access study

John Gruber writes about “the heart of the revolution at hand”, that mobile devices like the iPhone will supplant portable devices like notebooks.

Daring Fireball: Meg Hourihan on the iPhone as a Computer

If I speculate that ‘mobile computing’ will become more ubiquitous (not a stretch) and that the iPhone platform is already dominating in that space (open to interpretation) and if I’m developing a web site that needs to reach the mobile computing based audience, then I need to support Mobile Safari. If mobile devices become the ‘hottest’ part of the market for computing hardware and the iPhone platform becomes unequivocally dominant then Safari will be the new Internet Explorer. (Lazy or incompetent developers There will be developers who through laziness or incompetence of their own or of others will write only to Safari — but I think, given that it’s a hardware company, Apple can be a better steward of the public interest in a robust and interoperable web.)

Mad speculation? Maybe. But Flash doesn’t make the short list of technologies I plan to continue investing time and resources in learning.

Observations on David Tucker's Observations

DavidTucker.net — Observations about Apple, the iPhone, PhoneGap, and the Flash Player

If you choose not to follow the link above, understand that David develops in Flash and AIR.

Observation #1 — Apple has proactively sought to eliminate any cross-platform development platform on the iPhone.

What David wants is to be able to develop once to Flash and target multiple platforms including the iPhone.

He also mentions PhoneGap and quotes a section from the iPhone SDK agreement that prohibits applications that install or launch other executable code and he links to an Ajaxian post about apps that have been rejected from the App Store because of their use of PhoneGap. But the PhoneGap site says the iPhone is supported and has a gallery of apps that are in the App Store.

It’s not clear that the PhoneGap approach is actually prohibited. As I understand it, PhoneGap wraps a WebKit shell around your code and I would think that WebKit qualifies as an Apple API or interpreter. Maybe it’s a loophole Apple would like to plug. Maybe the App Store rejections were based on a misunderstanding of what PhoneGap is. The PhoneGap situation seems unclear.

There is no doubt about Flash. Flash is unequivocally prohibited.

Observation #2 — The Flash Player hasn’t been approved because it is a threat to Apple’s App Store Revenue.

There has been much concern within the development community about the downward race in prices on the App Store. Some developers have expressed disappointment that Apple hasn’t taken steps to curb the downward pressure on prices. Yet in terms of prices Apple has been very laissez-faire.

Apple is a hardware company. The App Store could be a loss leader. I know it isn’t. But the primary purpose of the App Store is to sell iPhones, not apps.

Observation #3 — Apple is only interested in helping Mac developers.

By ‘Mac developers’ David means Mac and iPhone developers. He’s essentially restating observation 1.

I don’t expect a Windows version of Xcode any more than I expect a Mac OS X version of Visual Studio.

Since the iPhone was unveiled in January 2007 attendance at WWDC has risen dramatically because of an influx of iPhone developers. And there’s a growing trend of developers that started as iPhone developers moving into Mac development. It would seem that learning “Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder, Cocoa, etc…” is not a high barrier.

David says that performance and battery life issues with Flash on the iPhone are “just not true.” I see performance and stability issues with Flash in Safari on Mac OS X. If Abode is uninterested in resolving these issues on the ‘full-size’ OS why should I even imagine Flash is better on an iPhone? If David is right, Adobe isn’t helping themselves.

David concludes:

Why is [Flash] not approved? In reality – because of Apple’s revenue stream.

The revenue David is talking about is revenue from the App Store and revenue from developers. I think this conclusion is wrong.

Time for a little history. Once upon a time there was a small computer company named for a piece of fruit. It developed and marketed a wonderful new peripheral for its computers. It was called a laser printer. The laser printer created a new market segment known as desktop publishing. Part of the magic of the laser printer was a built-in interpreter for a specialized language. The language and its interpreter were developed by an even smaller company. The even smaller company was able to leverage its technology into a lingua franca and take a large piece of the desktop publishing market for itself.

Apple doesn’t want Flash on the iPhone because they don’t want to repeat the ‘mistake’ of PostScript on the LaserWriter.

So yes it is about revenue but not on the tactical scale of App Store revenue today; it’s about long term strategy.

Apple is supporting HTML 5 in Safari. It’s not about being against cross-platform development. It’s about not ceding control to another company. Everything critical in the stack must be either proprietary to Apple or be an open standard. That’s why there’s no Flash plugin and no Java VM on the iPhone. And I don’t expect there ever will be.

Raganwald and Obsession Times Voice

Daring Fireball - Obsession Times Voice
43 Folders - 43f Podcast: John Gruber & Merlin Mann’s Blogging Panel at SxSW

I continue to be inspired by Reg’s raganwald blog. Thank you Mr. Braithwaite. But Reg has moved on and is no longer actively posting to raganwald.

I miss his blog but if I’m serious about my own blog (and there’s doubt about that) then I’m glad my blog is not competing with an active raganwald (and I don’t compete with raganwald in any literal sense.) In the audio of Mann and Gruber’s talk, Merlin says something like your blog needs to be better than 80% of the other blogs that are focused on the same obsession. I recall Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, writing that he greatly admired Gary Larson’s The Far Side and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and was consequently very glad when those strips ceased and ‘left the field.’

My blog, this blog, is not raganwald but like John Gruber’s New Yorker, it is a point of inspiration.

Now go read raganwald and see what you missed.

Geek/Tech/Science Takes on the Obama Inaguration

Kottke - Obama off by one

Scientific American Blog - Is Obama right that technology can lower health care costs?

Slate Magazine - The “war on science” is over. Now what?

Kottke - The country’s new robots.txt file

lifehacker - Inauguration: The White House Gets a Blog

Wired Magazine - The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House?

"Photoshop will now exit"

I realized tonight that Photoshop 7.0.1 doesn’t run under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Officially Adobe doesn’t support Photoshop 7.0 anymore and there will be no updates for Leopard compatibility. The consensus on various forums is that there is no work-around.

Link: Photoshop 7.0 - FixYa

I upgraded to Leopard a while ago and I’m running an old version of Photoshop, so clearly I’m not a heavy user. But I was a bit dismayed — for a moment. And then I thought “Why do I need Photoshop?”

My use of Photoshop was largely oriented toward preparing images for the web. There was a time when Photoshop was the leader among a very small number of applications that could do that job well. That’s no longer the case.

I will not be going back to Tiger for the sake of any one application. I will not be buying an upgrade from Adobe. I will be freeing up some space on my hard drive. Photoshop has left the building.

Science and Technology Television for a Seven Year Old

Television shows that my seven year old son enjoys that have science and technology content:

• MythBusters
• Fetch!
• Zula Patrol
• PEEP and the Big Wide World

Internet Explorer's Maximum URL Length

Note to self: Internet Explorer has a maximum URL size limit of 2,083 characters. Passing a longer URL (like maybe a URL with a dynamically built query string) to IE 7.0 will produce a cryptic error page (even with ‘Friendly’ turned off) that says “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” and then misleadingly suggests that the server can not be reached. Don’t waste time troubleshooting network connections or DNS lookups. Don’t be puzzled by why the same URL works in FireFox and Safari.

Safari 3.1 Develop Menu

SimpleBits: Safari 3.1 Develop Menu

waves

the show with zefrank: waves

(Via PragDave: Don't wear the yellow trunks.)

North Pole Voyager

A wonderful 2 minute film (that happens to be an ad.)

(Via O'Reilly Radar: Advertising Homage to the DIY Spirit (Via Adverganza: JC Penney ads rock, while sales suck))