Apple, Flash & CS5 Options

[crowdogs]

Has anyone any comments about Apples recent admonishment (and censorship, if you will) of Flash on its iPhone & iPad? See NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/technolo...lash&st=cse

Apple carries a pretty big stick and I was wondering if they could actually change the course of Flash. I wonder because I am considering the purchase of CS5 Web Premium when it is released later this month. I'am not ashamed to say that it will be a major investment for this hobbyist/freelancer at $1800.00 and well above my pay-grade's ability to fully utilize (if fully utilizing is even possible).

So, any thoughts about Flash's future, or lack thereof?

[Christian J]

Here's one from the Flash camp: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/the-futur...sh-mobile-apps/ --I wonder if the following is correct:

"What few people realize is that while H.264 appears to be an open and free standard, in actuality it is not. It is a standard provided by the MPEG-LA consortsia, and is governed by commercial and IP restrictions, which will in 2014 impose a royalty and license requirement on all users of the technology. How can the open Web adopt a format that has such restrictions?"

do I really want to shut out a large market segment from my website?

Which large market segment, iPhone/iPad users? I doubt the number of mobile phone browser users will ever become very large (compared with desktop/laptop/netbook browsers) due to the inconveniently small screens. I also doubt the Safari desktop browser will ever be able to outcompete the other browser vendors (and that way be able to outcompete Flash).

In any case plugins like Flash have always had various accessibility problems (including bandwidth requirements) even for users that do run it on their browsers, so I'm sure the general plugin market share will drop everytime something better (for users, advertizers or site owners) can replace the plugin. When it comes to multimedia I'm reminded of W3C's SMIL spec, though it's never had much of an impact AFAIK.

[Brian Chandler]

Here's one from the Flash camp: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/the-futur...sh-mobile-apps/ --I wonder if the following is correct:

"What few people realize is that while H.264 appears to be an open and free standard, in actuality it is not. It is a standard provided by the MPEG-LA consortsia, and is governed by commercial and IP restrictions, which will in 2014 impose a royalty and license requirement on all users of the technology. How can the open Web adopt a format that has such restrictions?"

There's a pot-vs-kettle session going on between Apple and Adobe. Neither has any interest in an open anything, except an open hole into which other people pour money they can collect.

The real problem is the patent scam: the US patent office hands out government-sanctioned monopolies on anything you can write on a piece of paper -- and the EU and other patent offices are trying to catch up with them. So any way of arranging anything can be "owned" by a corporation; there is no freedom to write programs, except by the grace and favour of various corporate interests. Which means that unless you are big enough to pose a threat you will probably be ok, but it is not a civilised way of organising a society. There are supposed to be anything up to 10,000 patents that my web site probably infringes. Even looking at them increases the possible ransom the mob can extract, but I risked it: just googled for 'web commerce patents'.

Here's a sample ransom note:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/patent/noti...gi?NoticeID=446

And here's the text of US patent 5715314 mentioned in the ransom note:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/pdf_colle...aedff6d4b36e9c1

I do have considerable experience of translating patent specifications, and I used to do some low-level handling of office actions in a patent office, so I believe I can read it, and yes, essentially it's a government-granted monopoly on... "selling something over the internet using a cryptographic system to pass credit card information." Um, duh. And unlike real protection rackets, even if you pay you get no protection, since the extortion is perfectly legal. So the other 9,999 gangs can come after you as well. (Not quite right: there are probably only hundreds of different gangs, holding huge piles of patents each.)