Ina Fried - Adobe’s Mobile Flash Pull­back Puts Android Tablet Mak­ers in Tough Spot

RIM rep on their strat­egy going for­ward with regard to Flash:

“As an Adobe source code licensee, we will con­tinue to work on and release our own imple­men­ta­tions. RIM remains com­mit­ted to deliv­er­ing an uncom­pro­mised Web brows­ing expe­ri­ence to our cus­tomers, includ­ing native sup­port for Adobe Flash Player on our Black­Berry Play­Book tablet (sim­i­lar to a desk­top PC browser), as well as HTML5 sup­port on both our Black­Berry smart­phone and Play­Book browsers,” RIM said in a state­ment to AllTh­ingsD. “In fact, we are pleased that Adobe will focus more efforts on the oppor­tu­ni­ties that HTML5 presents for our devel­op­ers, and shares our com­mit­ment to HTML5 as we dis­cussed together at Dev­Con Americas.”

Seri­ously.

‘Oppo­nents’:

It’s not that iOS’s pop­u­lar­ity for web brows­ing led to the death of mobile Flash; it’s that the lack of Flash — and the result­ing over­all improve­ment to speed, respon­sive­ness, and bat­tery life — led to the pop­u­lar­ity of iOS for web browsing.

(Via Dar­ing Fire­ball)

Yeah, that’s about how it shakes out. And that, I’d wager, is what’s going to do in Flash on the desk­top too. I know I’m not shy about dis­cussing the improve­ments in sta­bil­ity and bat­tery life on my own lap­top since I dis­abled Flash on my sys­tem. I say the same to my non-technical par­ents, who also have now moved to a Flash-free lifestyle. If my par­ents can do it, any­one can.

→ Adobe ends mobile Flash devel­op­ment:

This isn’t just the death of mobile Flash: it’s a con­fir­ma­tion from Adobe that all Flash is on its way out.

Adobe’s man­age­ment is also being prag­matic about its pri­or­i­ties. Rather than fight a los­ing bat­tle for a par­tic­u­lar run­time, Adobe can focus on what it does best: mak­ingtools for cre­ative professionals.

Whether those tools build Flash or HTML apps shouldn’t mat­ter: they should build what cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als need to build, and these days, that’s native mobile apps and HTML5 web apps.

(Via Marco.org)

From Danny Winokur, VP & GM, Inter­ac­tive Devel­op­ment at Adobe:

How­ever, HTML5 is now uni­ver­sally sup­ported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclu­sively. This makes HTML5 the best solu­tion for cre­at­ing and deploy­ing con­tent in the browser across mobile plat­forms. We are excited about this, and will con­tinue our work with key play­ers in the HTML com­mu­nity, includ­ing Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 inno­va­tion they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

I love Adobe. After Apple, Adobe is the com­pany I count on for hav­ing allowed me to quit my job to free­lance. I have a very large, soft spot in my pro­fes­sional heart for Adobe. What I know of Adobe is that when they focus, they turn out amaz­ing and pow­er­ful tools that we could never have imag­ined before. With each sub­stan­tive iter­a­tion of Cre­ative Suite and each prod­uct announce­ment, I’m filled with this sort of breath­less antic­i­pa­tion at dis­cov­er­ing what new won­ders will enable me to deliver a vision for my clients they never would have expected.

That’s where Adobe excels. They cre­ate the most pow­er­ful tools in the world for allow­ing cre­atives to do incred­i­ble work. Some­times I get the feel­ing that Adobe doesn’t know that.

Of course, the real news:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash devel­op­ers to pack­age native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer con­tinue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device con­fig­u­ra­tions (chipset, browser, OS ver­sion, etc.) fol­low­ing the upcom­ing release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and Black­Berry PlayBook.

It’s about time.

This is the march of tech­nol­ogy talk­ing on one hand, tim­ing on the other. The prob­lem with Flash has always been that it’s dev­il­ishly tricky to opti­mize in low-power envi­ron­ments. Had mobile chips come out with the horse­power required for Flash and a cold fusion reac­tor in the first place, we wouldn’t have been hav­ing dis­cus­sions about Flash on mobile. It would likely have been the dom­i­nant mobile media deliv­ery mech­a­nism. Unfor­tu­nately for Adobe, that real­ity only exists in some other time­line, which is about to be frozen in amber.

The upside is huge here. Get­ting Flash on mobile out of the pic­ture means that Adobe will get to the yeoman’s work of cre­at­ing the tools for cre­atives to build incred­i­ble things on all mobile plat­forms and focus on telling sto­ries rather than grace­ful degra­da­tion for the mobile experience.

One last inter­est­ing point:

We are already work­ing on Flash Player 12 and a new round of excit­ing fea­tures which we expect to again advance what is pos­si­ble for deliv­er­ing high def­i­n­i­tion enter­tain­ment expe­ri­ences. We will con­tinue to lever­age our expe­ri­ence with Flash to accel­er­ate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring sim­i­lar capa­bil­i­ties to HTML5 as quickly as pos­si­ble, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new fea­tures in Flash for a smooth tran­si­tion to HTML5 as the stan­dards evolve so devel­op­ers can con­fi­dently invest know­ing their skills will con­tinue to be leveraged.

That Flash will con­tinue as a dom­i­nant media dis­tri­b­u­tion pack­age for big media is sort of a no brainer to me. But this last bit seems to me as a real­is­tic assess­ment of progress in HTML5 for gen­eral rich media user expe­ri­ence. That Adobe is con­tin­u­ing to con­tribute and migrate under­ly­ing Flash tools says to me that they’re both aware that their future is in build­ing tools for a stan­dard which they do not con­trol, and that we’re not there yet. I think they’re right on both counts, but this is the first time I’ve heard nuance from Adobe that there is a future out there on the hori­zon for dep­re­cat­ing the Flash desk­top expe­ri­ence in favor of HTML5. It’s right there, in the sub­text: if we bring all these rich media capa­bil­i­ties to HTML5, who’s going to be left devel­op­ing in Flash?

On the upside, seems like the reli­gious argu­ments about the future of Flash on mobile have dialed back their fer­vor. And Adobe’s doing a pretty good job of plant­ing the seeds of trans­for­ma­tion here as opti­misti­cally as they can.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITERS’ BLOCK. – Andy Ihnatko’s Celes­tial Waste of Band­width (BETA)

But don’t say you’re “blocked,” ever. And for the love of almighty God, don’t seek answers from the sort of mad­men who insist and rein­force the idea that “writer’s block” is a real thing.

Your brain is highly mal­leable. If you train it to believe that you need to pull over to the side of the road and stop mov­ing for­ward the instant a “Writer’s Block” indi­ca­tor on the dash­board turns red, then over time, that’s the only solu­tion it’ll ever offer you.

Writ­ing is hard. That’s why so few peo­ple stick to it and actu­ally fin­ish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you fin­ish something.

And he should know. This guy turns out more word-shaped pix­els than just about any­one I [don’t actu­ally] know.

Review: The 2011 $79 Kin­dle with ads and but­tons:

The Kin­dle 1 and 2 felt like high-quality items, while the 3 and the new Kin­dle feel dis­pos­able. But they’re priced accord­ingly. The Kin­dle 1 was $400. This one’s $79 with ads.

Even the ads fit in more than I expected, because this doesn’t feel like a high-end device that com­mands respect, for bet­ter and for worse. Again, cheap, disposable.

Sounds about right. Too bad.

The day Steve Jobs called Wal­ter Isaac­son — Apple 2.0 — For­tune Tech

That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that tak­ing a long walk was his pre­ferred way to have a seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biog­ra­phy of him. I had recently pub­lished one on Ben­jamin Franklin and was writ­ing one about Albert Ein­stein, and my ini­tial reac­tion was to won­der, half jok­ingly, whether he saw him­self as the nat­ural suc­ces­sor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the mid­dle of an oscil­lat­ing career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

When Ben Franklin died, it was a loss, I have to imag­ine. But did they know, back then, that they’d lost Ben Franklin? Albert Ein­stein? Thomas Jef­fer­son? Nikola Tesla?

It feels like that’s some­thing of sub­stance this morn­ing, as I tap away on my Mac­Book Pro. Because we know that yes­ter­day, in so many ways, we lost our Ben Franklin. Albert Ein­stein. Thomas Jef­fer­son. Nikola Tesla.

On June 10, 2002, an Apple com­mer­cial with my face on it first aired on Com­edy Cen­tral after the first block of South Park. It hit CNN the next morn­ing, and my phone started ring­ing with calls from peo­ple I hadn’t heard from in years. “Do you have a twin brother?” they asked. No, no twin. Just me. Steve picked me.

I was in the first round of “Switch­ers,” the short-run cam­paign that offered sto­ries of real users of Apple prod­ucts. Me, Aaron Adams, Dave Hax­ton, Dianne Druyff, Liza Richard­son, Mark Frauen­felder, and Patrick Gant made up the first run of reg­u­lar users, Will Fer­rell, Yo-Yo Ma, De La Soul, and Tony Hawk mak­ing up some of the celebrity users.

Apple flew us to Boston and LA, handed us over to Errol Mor­ris who filmed us for hours and hours talk­ing into the cam­era in that hot-as-the-sun white ware­house. And then we fin­ished. They took the film (yes, film), carted it back to Cuper­tino, and shipped us home.

I switched back to Macs in March of 2002. That’s when I started using media again. I was a mid-level direc­tor at a big com­pany, stuck in a mon­u­men­tal rut. But I switched to Mac and found a way out. I dis­cov­ered what I could do with tech­nol­ogy again, what it meant to create.

August 1, 2007 I quit that job to free­lance. And I did it because Apple soft­ware and hard­ware became a cat­a­lyst for me to take a renewed con­trol over my career. And every time I think about that, not so deep in the back of my mind, I thank Steve Jobs. He rep­re­sents some­thing big­ger than a man, a leader and inven­tor. He’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what we can become when con­fronted with tragedy and evolve through it. Watch­ing Steve Jobs taught me not only to ask “what if…” but to find the courage to act on the answer.

The folks I worked with in Apple adver­tis­ing were very kind. They had told me time and again that all these were sub­ject to “Apple approval.” I’d asked if that meant that the footage would cross Steve’s desk. “All of it,” they said.

That morn­ing in 2002, Patrick Gant called me on the phone and said, “Go check out apple.com. Pre­pare to be blown away.” For some rea­son, out of all the switch­ers to cross that white ware­house stage, of all the sto­ries of how peo­ple use these tools, of all the pos­ing and preen­ing and crow­ing about the gear, for some rea­son, Steve picked me?

I never got to meet Steve Jobs. I wish, more than any­thing, I’d had a chance to shake his hand and say all this to his face. In some small part, I think I’ve been hold­ing out hope that one day I’d still get the chance to do so. Now, I’ll just have to trust that this mes­sage, along with mes­sages from the rest of us Switch­ers, and the mil­lions and mil­lions of peo­ple around the world shar­ing their own thoughts, will reach those who need to hear it.

Steve, what you brought to the world changed my life. What you leave in your wake is a fan­tas­tic can­vas. I’ll do my best to never stop ask­ing “what if,” and to find the courage to create.

I’m chang­ing my name. Again. It used to be PeteWright.co. That was then.

Now, it’s RashPixel.com.

See the twist there? It’s sub­tle, and it hap­pens right after the “o” in the “.co…” … … that’s right: I’ve added an “m”. Let me tell you why.

Late last week, I got a call from Linda Bon­der, the fan­tas­tic direc­tor of mar­ket­ing for The Inter­na­tional School. I do some sup­port and web work for the school, so it’s not wholly unusual for Linda to be call­ing me.

“Do you have a sec­ond?” she asks me. “This one is so strange I don’t know how to write it out in email.”

“Yeah. Go ahead,” I say.

“There’s a woman in Cal­i­for­nia who is receiv­ing our emails. Ran­dom emails. From the teachers.”

I was sure this ran­dom woman in Cal­i­for­nia was on the school’s mail­ing list some­where. That’s how these things hap­pen. Even smart peo­ple can go cross-eyed look­ing at long lists of names.

“And she’s not on the list. Anywhere.”

Hrm. So I asked Linda to for­ward me a few of the mes­sages. The Cal­i­for­nia woman had been receiv­ing them for some time, but the fre­quency had picked up in the last few weeks, since school started.

I ended up in an unre­lated meet­ing for the next hour, but Linda had taken the lib­erty of send­ing me a few sam­ples that Ms. Cal­i­for­nia had passed on. Then, toward the end of the hour, she texted me.

“Isn’t Sophie in Ann’s class?”

“Yeah… why?” I asked.

One of the emails she had for­warded, which I had yet to see, was from Sophie’s teacher. I cracked open my lap­top and checked mail. Sure enough, there were two mes­sages from Linda con­tain­ing mes­sages from Ann to the par­ents of my daughter’s class, which I’d never seen. Next in the list, a mes­sage from my son’s teacher, same deal.

Last, a mes­sage from the Chau­tauqua Insti­tu­tion Spe­cial Stud­ies office con­firm­ing receipt of my pitch to teach for them this sum­mer. I hadn’t received that either.

These things trig­ger the Sher­lock Holmes vibe in me. And in hind­sight, I wish the res­o­lu­tion to this mess hadn’t been so obvi­ous. This is where we get back to the “m” in .com.

In look­ing at the expanded head­ers on each mes­sage, sure enough, the address for yours truly was pete@petewright.com.

My email address was sup­posed to be @petewright.co. When I reg­is­tered the domain, a year ago, I’d thought opti­misti­cally that the world was ready for the .co domain, that vari­ants on top level domains had per­me­ated through Inter­net cul­ture and .co would be included in the canon of Inter­net reflex. Ama­zon, Google, Twit­ter, they’ve all gone with a .co for their prod­ucts. And it is, after all, the top level domain for the proud Repub­lic of Colum­bia.

As it turns out, sadly for the Repub­lic of Colum­bia, most of the world sees .co as a typo.

Sophie’s teacher did. As did my son’s. And so it was with the Chau­tauqua insti­tu­tion. All had cor­rected my address to @petewright.com, an address which does not exist … for me. Any time they had sent an email to me at my address@petewright.com, any address @petewright.com, it would miss me com­pletely. Today, I have the ben­e­fit of know­ing that this email was arriv­ing in the inbox of my new friend, Ms. California. But Ms. Cal­i­for­nia was not the owner of petewright.com. She hadn’t heard of it, doesn’t know any Wrights, and has been using the same email address for more than 15 years. So, for as long as this issue had been hap­pen­ing, she’d been delet­ing it, mark­ing it junk.

The domain is actu­ally reg­is­tered by a nice fam­ily in Cal­i­for­nia. I know this because as any enter­pris­ing cit­i­zen of the Inter­net would do, I looked them up in WHOIS and called them directly. Vis­it­ing the site shows it at the registrar’s land­ing page — clearly they weren’t actu­ally using it for any­thing. So, I had two objec­tives: 1) make sure they know that there is a redi­rect prob­lem and that *@petewright.com email is being redi­rected to Ms. Cal­i­for­nia. 2) If they really weren’t doing any­thing with it, might they be inter­ested in let­ting me have a go with it for a few ducats?

No. They’d reg­is­tered it for their son when he was born and were sit­ting on it until he was “of age.” As for the email redi­rect, they said they might get to it. The nice woman who answered said that it was her hus­band that han­dled all the “net stuff” and that I should leave my name and he would call me back. No calls yet.

This week­end, I ended up at a meet­ing with a group of clients won­der­ing why I hadn’t writ­ten them back. They hadn’t heard from me in months. Turns out, Ms. Cal­i­for­nia had been delet­ing their mes­sages, too.

And my bills, state­ments, friend’s mes­sages, the works. I don’t know how much mail ended up in Ms. California’s inbox as a result of this snafu, but that any of it missed me because of this typo cre­ates a fail­ing sys­tem — one I can’t trust.

So, for now, petewright.co will be retired in favor of rashpixel.com. There’s a story to be told about the new name, one that, I think, rep­re­sents more of who I am as a ser­vice provider, and who I’ve become over the last half-decade of work. I look for­ward to telling it, as this site evolves over the com­ing months. I’ll be retir­ing the orig­i­nal name of my busi­ness in this whole messy process, so with this I bid farewell to fifthandmain.com, too. It was fun while it lasted. But I’m really look­ing for­ward to what’s next.