No Boundaries

The second thing which just came up last week was the newly interminable issue of Flash vs the Ipad. This rhetorical phenomena has caused me to download tweetdeck and even tweet, if only a morsel or five. Six maybe. Seven. But I intend to put away the tweetdeck as soon as everything dies down. It is moments like these when the twittery is most hyperbolic. I think both sides are a bit full of it on this one.

The current status of the debate, per my little tweetdeck, is: “Flash is terribly buggy and an historical web practice already” vs” the internet will consist of vast holes filled with blue lego icons if Flash is excluded”.

Quietly, yesterday, Communications Arts selected a webpick of the day (26000 Vodka) that puts almost all four trillion of these tweet-rants, on both sides, to rest. The concept is degradation.  This, simply put, is: knowing that not everything can be supported on every platform, a developer can present the lowest common denominator technology first, determine if a more sophisticated technology is supported (either by asking the user to choose or directly evaluating which technologies are supported on the device), and then make use of the highest level of technology that will work or that the user finds most comfortable.

In the majority of cases, it’s not all that more difficult to build a site that will provide the best experience that the current technology can provide (using Flash, Silverlight or whatever) , and degrade to something that will offer a less vibrant and innovative, though stable, experience on devices which don’t support those technologies.

So neither the “Flash is dead”, nor the “myriad of lego boxes” arguments have merit. A lesser tier of content will make it’s way to the Ipad via the web.  The App Store will be the source of any sophisticated stuff which runs on the device, and this will be entirely preselected by Apple. Hulu likely will never be welcome.

This will be a good thing for Flash beyond the Ipad controversy because currently many netbooks and other gizmos are not well suited for running large Flash applications.

Beyond this relatively simple and elegant solution, here are a few of my thoughts:

The Ipad will not be going away. It will start off slowly but will improve with new versions and will become an important platform whose design requirements must be met. I also think it is a really cool device that does have a place in the world and will open a whole new realm of print design for the internet. I don’t want an Iphone, but I might be interested in a third generation Ipad. Unless, of course, a competing version arrives in the interim which will support Flash, allow multitasking, has a USB port and isn’t tethered to AT&T.

Flash is good.  It can do many things that can’t be approached by other technologies (although Silverlight may surprise us all in the long run). People tend to think of Flash in terms of video and annoying lame ads because that is where it is most commonly recognized as being present. It is more ubiquitous and powerful than most imagine.

Flash’s strengths are in the realms of science, art, gaming, involved-branded-experience and video. It is also constantly changing (although it has been purposefully hampered in this evolution by Adobe, for business reasons that aren’t clear) and will be much more a year from now than it is today.  So comparison of what will (possibly) be done with other technologies in a year or so with what Flash can do today is not a reasonable argument. Flash is a moving target. And now that a fire has been set beneath our good friends at Adobe, I strongly suspect that Flash is off to the races like nobody’s business.

The web has progressed from brochure types of sites to dynamic sites and now is moving into a new realm of applications. These can be purchased, advertising-supported, or branded-experience-driven. Flash is currently the best product, and has the best potential going forward, for building really complex applications, including, soon, those that are delivered through the Apple App Store.

Flash CS5 will allow for export of an xml DOM file of the base flash file with media folders. Someone may build applications that can convert these, with a little fidgeting and know-how, into less sophisticated HTML5, HTML4 or other Ipad-supported technologies. It might even be Adobe. In other words the various Flash development tools may soon generate all types of Ipad compatible files in addition to files which require the Flash player to run. One stop development.

Apple fans are tweeting at an alarming rate, a dozen (up to maybe fifty) tweets per minute (for days and days now), that Flash is buggy, causes constant crashing, doesn’t even run well on their mac’s.  Recently the tweets of this variety have begun adding other software (Microsoft word etc) to the list of things that make Apple products constantly crash and thanking Apple for excluding those products as well. The ultimate tweet along this tweet-jectory will be that mac’s run nothing other than Apple software without crashing and it is all somebody else’ fault. This is not a good thing for Apple.

From the PC user’s perspective, where the Flash player and Word etc. run just fine, the Apple products appear to be a bit of a weak sister. My personal experience has been that once you start building very large (enormous)  files, with any of the Adobe products (photoshop, illustrator, indesign etc.), you are much better off running on a PC. But I’ll never tell that to an Apple fan, never.

Annoying Flash-based ads will simply switch to another delivery vehicle. Look forward to annoying HTML5-based ads or backward to annoying animated gif ads. They are annoying by design. Flash is merely the delivery tool of the day. The loss of the annoying ad market will be the best thing that ever happened for Flash. Once they are in HTML nothing can be used to make them go away.

HTML5 will prove to be just as processor-intensive and misused as is Flash, may be a very long time coming to all available browsers, and will likely be implemented differently, piecemeal and at different rates for every piece, on all of them.

It took me a long time to understand what all of the Ipad name fuss was about, and I live in a household with three women. I think that in a year the image that pops up in everyone’s mind when they hear the word Ipad will be the Ipad.

The Apple Ipad/App Store business strategy is brilliant in many ways, but may severely backfire. Probably the main reason for Apple’s insistence on keeping Flash from their device is two-fold.  Both are related to Apple’s App Store. If Flash, or a USB port and a lot of storage for that matter, were available, the App Store apps would be lost amidst a gazillion competing apps that could be run directly on the internet or be installed independent of the App Store.

The App Store provides Apple both thirty percent of all developer revenue and a nice clean neighborhood of apps wherein Ipad users can be confident that any bad, nasty, buggy, pornographic, racist, sexist or otherwise distasteful apps have been filtered from the selection by the good people at Apple. It is a neighborhood with good reliable zoning. You can buy-in with confidence that a strip club won’t open up next door.

There are a few problems with all of this.

It establishes Apple as the world’s top censor of the internet. If you want anything above the lower tier functionality of HTML/CSS and Javascript to run on the Ipad you will have to use something that has been packaged for — and distributed through — the App Store.  Chinese and Iranian governmental censors won’t be able hold a candle to the volume of material from which the Ipad user has been protected. Such is the cost of a good clean neighborhood.

It monetizes the existing work of many others. In order to access the Ipad, many existing web-based applications will have to retrofit. This could involve recoding in a way where they can still run on the web and be accessed by the Ipad. However, at this time, an alternative coding technology for many of these is not available, so they will have to go through the App Store and pay Apple thirty percent of their existing revenue stream for that privilege. It is conceivable that applications will have two prices where the Apple price is thirty percent more than the PC price.

Flash is an artform used daily by millions both to earn a living, and more importantly as a vital form of self-expression. To attempt to destroy an artform as a way to protect the bottom line is just terribly wrong.

Hey, it just occurred to me.  The Superbowl is coming up.  Somebody needs to throw another hammer into a another insensate corporate monolith.