When Apple forbid all modern languages to compile native iPhone application they officially declared that shit was on between them and Adobe. And they didn’t do it in a nice subtle way but with a big slap in the developers face. A lot of stuff happened after that. Steve Jobs wrote an open letter about Adobe and the flame war amongst the fan boys erupted and made Eyjafjallajökull look like a camp fire.

Apple evicts flash way too early. I’m all for a web where plugins as flash is not required. Unfortunately HTML5 doesn’t cover everything flash covers right now. There isn’t even good tools to make HTML5 canvas applications. Right now I see flash as the spackling paste that fill all the holes that HTML, CSS or JavaScript leaves exposed. Some of those holes right now is live streaming, webcam access and multi-touch. In 10 years the browser coverage of HTML5 may be as good as flash and there will be some sweet tools to work with but right now we unfortunately need flash. And in 10 years flash has probably (and hopefully) evolved into something else covering up some other gaps.

In Steve’s letter he urges Adobe to make HTML5 tools. And as a matter of fact, they are working on it. Some time ago they demonstrated this. Unfortunetly it didn’t make it into CS5 but in the Web 2.0 Expo 2010 Adobes CTO Kevin Lynch said the following:
“We’re going to make great tooling for HTML5. We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML5.”

Jobs also talks about how stuff should be open like H.264. This is as Ida would’ve put it, “tossing beavers in a log house” and just plain wrong. H.264 is proprietary and costs money. That is as closed as flash. And that’s the reason open web browsers like Firefox doesn’t support it. And it seems a bit hypocritical to praise H.264, openness and the death of closed plugins like flash and at the same time use the equally closed quicktime format on the movie clips on the apple web site.

The codec question is not a simple issue, Robert Nyman has written a good article on the subject.

Take care peoples!
// Johan