Loved and hated the podcast this week.

Ian, you are turning into an Apple bully boy.

Flash/HTML5… they may be all be the same eventually, this matters not. You'll still get shite processor hungry adds, crap games, lazy programming & all that good stuff, er, obviously not present on the Apple platform…. 60+ fart noise apps alone, hand warmers, gun noises etc. aside of course.

Chris has it right, the wider implication of 'control' is what is SO worrying about this. It seems to me so at odds with your stance on things like governmental control over the digital future. Very dissapointed that you repeated your final shout-down a couple of times…. “this is big busniness”…. true… and painfully obvious….. but no justifiction at all.

Flash is FREE to develop for using the FLEX SDK & an open source editor of your choice – a fact often overlooked by the haters. Open standards will win & Adobe are inside the tent pissing out by the look of it…

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/356893/flash-folded…
http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/

Anecdotally I have this: my most favourite gadget of all time is my ipod touch – I really love it & use it everyday. But I wish I could access some website content that is currently restricted. BBC is a big one, but there are countlesss others and we're just too far away from the point where all those sites are converted to be 'apple friendly'. So I'll be upgrading to an Android phone in the next couple of months.

My guess is users will determine that plugins will have a future in the open web. Naturally it seems to follow that mobile device manafacturers will have to offer *their users the choice* to install them or fall behind.

… we shall see over time.

Paul

I have a MiFi for work and as long as you are in a good 3 reception area it is an awesome bit of kit. Highly recommended.

p.s. Chris, the use of Windows MoFo is copyright me

Cheers for the feedback. I like my Apple products but I would disagree that I'm a bully. Conscious of time in the podcast that segment didn't really end very well.

My issue with Flash isn't the content it presents – it's that on the Mac, the plugin supplied by Adobe sucks. Terrible performance, prone to crashing and considering most of the time I just want to watch a video it's very frustrating. More annoying – it's been like this for a few years. I don't see iPhone app's or their developers as better or less lazy than their Flash equivalents. Also, if Flash runs then my battery on the Macbook runs out more quickly than it does with a video playing.

Apart from that, no issue with Adobe. If Apple want to fight with Adobe then go for it. I've no preference either way. I do understand though why Flash is blocked on the iPhone – I've still to see in the flesh or via a review site Flash working well on a modern smartphone. Maybe latest versions of Flash will change that.

As for Flash development, thanks for pointing out the free development route. I've never had an issue with Flash development but it's useful to know. The 3.3.1 rule change that Apple introduced, for me, is Apple controlling the development environment and also the future route for iPhone OS. i don't think it's about killing Flash or Adobe. This post has some interesting idea's on why the rules were changed – http://stevecheney.posterous.com/the-genius-in-…

What will be wrong is if Adobe is blocked from using it's tools to make iPhone App's but other's like Unity aren't. At the moment, games made using Unity are still being accepted in the App store. Unity dev's are meeting Apple in the next few days so hopefully their will be some clarity on this – http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/14/unity-and-t…

Other aspect of Apple that I don't like – secrecy. The 3.3.1 rule change is ambiguous, open to interpretation and hence isn't great for developers. Secrecy is great when it comes to product launches but not so much for the developer ecosystem.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts once you get an Android phone – if I wasn't happy with the iPhone I'd certainly be looking in that direction.
There's probably more to say, but times is against me and my stomach is rumbling.

Nice one. If (big if now with the delay) I picked up an iPad I may look at the MiFi as an alternative to getting the 3G version. iPad is that close to new iPhone though that I doubt I'll be getting both.