Publishing with Silicon

Today Steve Jobs called Adobe “Lazy.”

Flash has dramatically improved since Adobe bought Macromedia. Papervision 3D is a 3D engine that runs on Actionscript, this sort of capability was unheard of back when Macromedia ran Flash. 

Flash is spreading all over the place: set top boxes, TVs, phones, everywhere except the iPhone. It is ubiquitous for ads and video on the web. No wonder Steve is jealous. What is the install base of Quicktime?

Flash runs fine on every other phone. Is the iPhone buggy? no, it is intentionally dumbed down in the interest of rabid monopolistic tendencies of one eccentric genius.

Steve should remember that Apple would have died save for its use as a graphics platform running Adobe technology for a long stretch of time.

The iPhone will be a better device when it supports Flash.

It will be great when Steve retires… as much as he has done for the company and the world, he really has conquered everything that needed conquering; the world needs a little less conquering and fewer dumbed-down, closed-source, “no VM allowed” systems like the iPhone and iPad.

With the iPad we witness the first case in history of computing where the limitations of a small device float upwards into a bigger device, instead of the opposite (remember when Moore’s law was a good thing?): who is lazy???

Frustrating that the iPad seems to inherit more from the iPod than from laptops… I really think that’s less than desirable and I will probably not bother with it. I spent years lugging around 17″ laptops… my 15″ macbook pro feels portable enough. As far as Apple innovation, I am hoping for a Mac Pro that is smaller than a tank.

I would hope that big computing would flow into smaller devices, rather than the limitations of small devices flow up into larger ones, as seems to be the case with the iPad.

Of course I am unhappy that they would not support Flash on the iPad, if that is the case (a bit unclear from news today). There could be no performance excuse, as they had with the iPhone initially. It is funny how Adobe and Apple have oscillated between being friends and rivals: at several points Adobe software seemed to keep the Mac afloat. Now that Flash is a very powerful VM, and AIR can function almost like an OS, it is no wonder there is some rivalry. But kicking Flash out of the iPod was short-sighted, kicking it (and other laptop-level features) out of tablets would be self-destructive.