Hey y'all, getting testy again in here (pun intended) ?
I'll chime in on a couple...
Flash is dead. In the first place, Flash was never supposed to be used the way it is currently most popular, wrapping video. It was/is a vector (that is line art not motion picture) animation program that had web interaction elements built into it. And it was good at it. It filled a great niche because at the time, the only other alternative was animated gif's that were beyond cheesy and large in size (remember bandwidth was slow at that time), or the more serious Java which is also a bitch on the client side. A few years later, the byproduct of wrapping those animations was a video compressor that also served a great niche in that most browsers could deal with it in a respectable way... but none of them were very happy about it because it was, and still is a resource hog in comparison to any other NATIVE browser tech. It is for all intents and purposes a Javascript wrapper that interacts via a brute force plug in. The only reason it is acceptable is that the alternatives were no better, and had less features. Until HTML5.
In my opinion, Adobe bought MM to kill it, not to further develop it and will let Flash die the way that it did it's other rival/competing products (Dreamweaver, Freehand and Fireworks). Adobe never "got" the net too well. I could tell you stories of conversations I had with Adobe people about their thoughts on the web 15yrs ago when they firmly believed that Acrobat would be what Flash eventually became, but that would be a longer post that would bore the cocks off of everyone except maybe TM.
Anyway, mark the time, within 2yrs., Flash will be non-existent, except for cheapskates like TM's clients who will refuse to spend a couple of grand to have someone from India spend 2 weeks to redo their oh so precious interactive sites <grin>.
And as a very heavy web user I say good riddance - I cannot tell you how many times I've cursed those horridly developed useless intro page animations. Just because you can add swirling logos synchronized to midi versions of Green Day "music" does not mean that you should. God I hate what flash has allowed poor web designers to do. And for the record, yes, I want to skip the intro.
So, to bring this back home, I think it is great that Apple is once again taking the lead on this. I remember when everyone was outraged about that funny colored computer that (GASP!) didn't even have a floppy drive. No one would buy it, there are much faster machines, you can't even get in there and add a card to it. Make no mistake about it Apple's decision to remove floppies was the single biggest factor in the consumer adoption of all of the removable storage that we use today. I'm not saying that they would have never been, but that move was a landmark in computer history. As was the iPod (for the music industry, and higher capacity micro drives and NAND memory). As was the iPhone (for multi-touch). Not the first, but just the right mix at the right time.
So get this straight, weather you like it or not, the iPad is just another one of these devices. Kindle is dead. All other tablets, um, well, unless you are a medical or military professional you've probably never even heard of any, let alone used one. The right mix, at the right time.
Apple invented the concept of the personal computer with a minimal lifespan that was meant to be used by people who do not care about it's inner workings. No tech. It is a vision for the end user, period. They had a great slogan that sums up their philosophy, The hub of your digital life. Not of your work, not of your relationship with your technician nor a software writers livelihood. They were talking about how average people can use a well designed appliance to do cool things easier via the simplest interface possible.
The iPad is just the next thing. You should get used to that type of appliance. Remember that we are the first of our generation (computer users). Talk to your grandfather about steam locomotives and I'm sure he'll have a twinkle in his eye and talk romantically about what a privilege it was. These days we are pissed that it still takes 4 hrs and costs 50 because we just can't stomach driving the 401.
