Adobe Flash: Just because Steve Jobs says it's bad doesn't mean it's good

Steve Jobs' self-serving Thoughts on Flash were controversial to say the least. Yes, he was hypocritical and self-serving (as usual), but he certainly wasn't wrong.

Adobe wants everyone to treat Flash as if it is an open standard, but they haven't made it open source. They made some parts of it open source, but not the parts that matter - and as a result, developers are constantly left wondering which platforms are going to work.



As a friend said, "Apple seems just as evil as Microsoft, just not as
successful. And Jobs seems even more evil than Bill Gates. Certainly
a bigger bastard." I totally question Steve Jobs' motives in wanting to crush Flash, but I don't think Adobe deserves a great deal of sympathy.

Will HTML5 make app stores obsolete? Don't count on it.

HTML5 is a lovely platform for cross-device development. Basically, it's the only game going forward. But it's really not an answer for building a great app for a given platform. Apple is talking up HTML5 in order to combat Flash, but it's just talking about web sites, not apps. HTML5 will rule the [moribund] desktop, but for mobile devices I think it has major challenges.

HTML5 does not get the same level of access to the device that you need to build a rich experience.

• Integration with the contact list (is there anything really more important?)
• Access to phone status, history and actions
• Camera(s), proximity sensor(s), microphone(s), accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, multi-touch, speakers, etc (and a lot more to come)
• Local storage, access to SD-card files, application backup and restore
• Native configuration and management interfaces (sync, preferences, phone migration, privacy, network gsm-vs-wifi, etc)
• ... drumroll please: the app stores. This is the channel for getting apps for these devices. Otherwise they have to find your website somehow.

HTML5 apps will be good enough in some cases for all devices, but they'll always be step-children to the native environment. You could argue that we just don't care about the weird sensors and whatever else HTML5 doesn't give us access to. I disagree: the really useful apps for mobile platforms will take full advantage of these features, recording and correlating all sorts of information and drawing conclusions from it - where you are, where your customers are, when you're together, what you're carrying with you, how your spouses are getting along, what you've sold them, transcripts of your conversations, your body temperature, what they've bought recently, voice stress analysis, who else is around, what's mouldering in their warehouse, and what expression is on your face. Science fictional? Sure. "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Mobile technology is going to level the playing field for these kinds of intelligent applications.

HTML5 will continue to evolve and will slowly add access to mobile functionality common to all devices, in a lowest-common-denominator way. The fact that Webkit will be on Blackberry by the end of the year makes HTML5 a cross-browser contender - it will lock up the entire mobile landscape, making cross-platform browser apps even easier. But so far, geolocation is one of the few things that work cross platform. The full list of things above will come over Steve Jobs' dead body. [I'm only half-joking.] PhoneGap is the only cross-platform development environment that currently has any viability at all, and it's risky because Apple routinely rejects PhoneGap-based apps; although they're written in JavaScript which is technically allowed, Apple takes a dim view of anything not *originally* written in Objective C. I don't expect Apple to be changing direction and opening up their platform and their store. If RIM survives [fat chance] its app store may go in a different direction - but I'm not holding my breath: RIM is completely beholden to [evil] carriers.

The app stores are large and getting crowded. But the publishers, labels, studios and carriers are in bed with the Google and Apple markets, and they have real legs. The markets are evolving extremely fast, especially Google's (which is moving into music and movies, and even has meta-markets like AppBrain) and Apple is s-l-o-w-l-y migrating to a non-desktop iTunes store. The smartphone market is exploding, and every one of these devices has an icon on the front screen for the app store. I don't expect these stores to go away any time this decade - there's just too much money to be made.

Darwin's Bastards

People who know almost nothing about what they're talking about are often more enthusiastic than the ones who know a lot, so they do all the talking, while the ones who know their shit stay silent and get red in the face.

— Sheila Heti, in There Is No Time In Waterloo

Darwin's Bastards is a very high quality collection of science fiction. It's so good that it doesn't even bill itself as being all Canadian. ISBN 978-1-55365-492-6. Well worth the read.

Be angry over corporate control of media, not political partisanship

National Public Radio published an article about the public's lack of trust in the media. They point to examples perceived political bias at CNN and Fox News, and the biases of the reporters in question, but they pointedly ignore corporate influence on news coverage.

But focusing on the popular political differences between Democratic and Republican news outlets is convenient for an organization like NPR, which is beholden to the corporate sponsors who pay for large 23% of its budget. One need only hear "brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket to the World" to understand who has influence over NPR's editorial policies. It really doesn't behoove NPR to point out that the public shouldn't trust NBC's analysis of war planning, since NBC's parent company General Electric does on the order of two billion dollars per year in DOD contracts.

The differences between Democratic and Republican policies are conveniently distracting, pitting the snake handlers vs the sodomites, the sheet-wearers vs the welfare queens, etc. Consolidation of media ownership continues apace, with major corporations effecting central control of all types of media. The recent media extinction events have helped speed this process, and media co-ops have yet to attract a major audience.

The media can't police itself, it sold us out a long time ago. But its attempts to shift the blame for its lack of public trust to its reporters and editors is increasingly obvious and ineffective.

Attention whores in the reputation economy

Yesterday on my way home I saw an ambulance driver texting as she drove. (At least she didn't have her siren and lights on.) But that wasn't the ironic part - no, that was the act of will that kept me from whipping out my phone and tweeting about it. Or better yet, whipping out my phone, taking a picture of her while I attempted to drive, and then tweeting the link. On the whole I'm glad I made it home alive.

The walk to the subway station this morning was surreal. It was snowing pink cherry blossoms which covered the streets and the grass, making me think of nuclear fallout and what a challenge it would be to clean that up if it wasn't just, you know, flower petals.

So then at the subway station there were new additions to the usual gauntlet of free newspaper pushers: a couple of well-scrubbed men pushing The Watchtower. So many voices clamoring to be heard.

The problem isn't an attention deficit, it's a surplus of bullshit. We create a cloud, a lake, an ocean, a galaxy of data, simultaneously afraid of where all this data is going and afraid that if we don't reveal more our voice won't be heard. We've reached the point of saturation with trivia and are waiting for the tool that will come along and stitch it together, but we're afraid of what that'll show. Mostly we're afraid that it'll expose our banality, our utter simplicity and lack of special worthiness of this embarrassment of riches that has been visited upon us.

I have the whole of human knowledge at my fingertips and I want to know more about the Octomom.

Google Docs lets you upload any file! Really? No, not really.

I decided to give it a try. Sounded cool.


Uh, ok. That doesn't make much sense. Is the limit 250MB or 1MB? Or what? I guess I'll look at the help.

So tell me, how does this reconcile with "Upload any file"? Not a great experience here. Google, I'm disappointed.

Rogers tells HTC Dream users to turn off GPS or 911 calls won't go through

On January 15 I received an SMS message from Rogers telling me I'd better disable GPS on my phone or I wouldn't be able to make 911 calls. This is the latest chapter in the unhappy saga of the HTC Dream on Rogers.

Rogers/Fido service message: URGENT 911 Calls: Please disable GPS location on your HTC Dream device to ensure all 911 calls complete. HTC is urgently working on a software upgrade and we will provide details shortly so you can re-enable GPS.

Instructions: Select Menu - Select Settings - Select Location - Uncheck Enable GPS Satellite

Message de Rogers/Fido : URGENT - Appels 911 : Veuillez désactiver la localisation GPS sur votre appareil HTC Dream afin de vous assurer que tous les appels 911 soient acheminés. HTC développe le plus rapidement possible une mise à jour du logiciel et nous vous fournirons les détails sous peu afin que vous puissiez réactiver la fonction GPS.

Instructions : Sélectionner Menu - Sélectionner Paramètres - Sélectionner Location - Désactiver les satellites GPS

First Rogers announces that they're not providing any more upgrades to the software on this platform. Then they announce that they'll upgrade Dream users to the HTC Magic for free (well, with a contract extension). Then the damn thing just doesn't work. Ah, the joys of early adoption...

I just want an Android device with a keyboard. Is that too much to ask?

Accountability moment: not one more gay cent until we see some results

When politicians make promises, they should be held to them. Especially when they promise hope, a new kind of politics, that they want to take contributions from actual people and be accountable to them. Well, we heard lots of promises, but we've not seen any action. Until we start seeing the change we paid for, President Obama and the Democratic party can forget about getting any more of my money:

I pledge not to donate to the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America, or the Obama campaign until Congress passes, and the president signs, legislation enacting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), and repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

And yes, I'm serious about this. You'd better believe corporate donors are getting their money's worth right now, as they belly up to the trough for "healthcare reform". If they don't get what they paid for, they're not going to give again – and guess what, neither am I.

Both DOMA and DADT were passed during the previous Democratic administration. The just-finished Bush administration produced plenty of sturm und drang about teh gays, but never actually did legislative harm to us. The Obama administration had better start righting some wrongs, and President Obama had better start doing something to fulfill his pledge to be a "fierce advocate" for our community. With sixty filibuster-breaking votes in the senate and a strong majority in the house, the Democratic party has an opportunity to actually pass the agenda they trumpet when they come around begging for cash. With the midterm elections coming the time to act is now; otherwise it becomes increasingly obvious that the Democratic party is determined to block action on these issues in order to keep the gay money coming.

Either put up or find another sucker. If you feel the same way, join me in the pledge.

The cross-species dinosaur team meets to discuss the ideal design for a mammal

Distributed is the new Object Oriented

In the 80s, Object Oriented development promised a fundamental reshaping of the software development landscape, and it had distinct religious overtones. (You can tell it was religious because Object Oriented is capitalized.) It was going to be better in every way from procedural programming - everything would be reused, bugs would be eliminated, and mass love would result. Like Theravada Buddhism, once you accepted the Four Noble Truths of Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Modularity everything else followed. This fever gripped the development world for twenty years, and thousands of developers never made the mental shift necessary to embrace it.

Leaders often made the fateful decision to rewrite existing procedural apps in object oriented technologies. Did the resulting programs run better? Um, no. Did they conquer the marketplace? God no. Did they run faster? Hell no. Windows Vista is a prime example; I'm not going to rehash any personal case histories because the pain is still too great. I'll let you know when I'm strong enough to cry.

Distributed development is as different from Object Oriented as Object Oriented is from procedural development. Most of the existing cadre of developers will never get this stuff, just as most procedural developers never figured out OO. Hadoop / MapReduce and Erlang require a rethinking of how problems should be solved, and a rethinking of what problems can be solved. Instead of figuring out how to best rewrite yesterday's apps with today's technologies, it's much better to treat them as solved problems and move on.