So Apple announced the iPad Wednesday before last, and like every little good geek I followed along with the live-bloggers, attentive to every tedious twist. I’ve been thinking about buying a book reader of some sort recently and this is an interesting addition to the mix. Will I shell out $700 for this thing in a few months? I’m leaning towards no, however I will defer my decision for 3-4 months, which says a lot I guess. I’m really interested to see how this thing fares regardless. I think the reason all us tech dorks love speculating about the iPad is that it’s a total unknown, it could be a huge success or fail spectacularly. As an observer on the sidelines I’d find either of those outcomes fun to watch. For my own worthless speculation however, I’d guess the boring middle ground: sells ok, nowhere near as big as the iPod/iPhone. We’ll see.
Once again listening to MacBreak as I do, they sprang off the iPad to discuss more about Flash vs HTML5/Canvas again, which in turn got me a bit worked up… again. Sometime later I found this link to an article on John Nack’s blog via Gina Trapani’s site. This article is really great and sums up my own points and many others in a much better way than I would have. John is a developer for Adobe, but I think his article is very even handed. You should read it, its good. John’s Main points which I will briefly echo here:
- Flash is flawed, but it has moved the world forward.
- Open standards are great, but they can be achingly slow to arrive.
- Talk of “what’s good for standards is bad for Adobe” is misinformed nonsense.
- Flash will innovate or die. I’m betting on innovation.
Hear, hear people. You can blame developers or designers or even Adobe for shitty flash sites if you like, but they are not to blame. If you see a guy with a mullet dyed red, white and blue and a neck tattoo of a fat naked clown, do you blame the barber, the tattoo artist? I hope not, because there’s a 99% chance they weren’t recommending that crazy nonsense. In fact, they probably tried to talk the guy out of it. I would argue the same is true of Flash widgets and sites. Flash makes more things possible, often at the cost of higher resources. Clients often only see the additional possibility and go off the fucking rails with it. Sometimes, try as you might, you just can’t talk people out of dumb fucking ideas.
On to HTML5 though, since my last post on the subject, I stumbled across this great demo site for html5 by Remy Sharp. These demos look really promising for the future possibilities of the web. I’m hoping to get an opportunity to build off some these examples myself. Remy also did a talk about the demos at JSConf.eu. Good stuff
