The InkWells

My dear friend Steve Jobs (and when I say dear friend I mean someone I’ve never met) has posted an article today describing their (Apple’s) relative disgust with Adobe for playing less nice than Apple as concerns Flash.

If you know nothing about computers the facts in this article might seem acceptable, but if you happen to know that the Internet isn’t something that exists on your computer then you will probably see at least some of the comedy available.

… we met Adobe’s founders…

I do so love the royal We.  It’s just rare one sees it in polite company anymore.

The two companies [Apple and Adobe] worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing…

What?  What happened to Aldus?  PageMaker anybody?  Adobe acquired Aldus, kept PageMaker, and dumped Freehand (both successful Aldus products).  Oddly enough, Adobe ended up reacquiring Freehand when they much later acquired Macromedia.  The victors get to write the histories, I guess.  According to the Wikipedia article PageMaker “… is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing (DTP) field”, but this is certainly not something which can be credited to Adobe.  And Queen Steve?  Who’s garage where They in and what were They smoking?

First, there’s ‘Open’.

For Apple to accuse Adobe of running a closed system with Adobe’s Flash is the best example of the pot calling the kettle black I have seen in print.  It’s like Adolf Hitler accusing Joseph Stalin of “not being very nice”.  Oh, that’s not fair.  It’s not as though it were Microsoft accusing IBM of using proprietary systems.  Pick two minor totalitarian dictators from history (there are so many) and you’ll have the basic point.

It is true that “Flash products are 100% proprietary”.  But it is also true that the App Store is a conduit utterly controlled by Apple.  I’m not a big fan of Flash, but I don’t want to be forced into one store to do my shopping either.

Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards.

What about, say, Perl?  Or Ruby?  PHP?  MySQL?  I mean, there are dozens of ‘open’ programming languages and environments which Apple is necessarily excluding.  And because they control the conduit and the operating system there is no way for any of us to foist any of these other options on board.  They foist so that we don’t have to.

Apple even creates open standards for the web.

One.  Webkit.  And, let’s be honest, Apple didn’t create Webkit.  They co-opted an existing open source browser (Konqueror) and transformed that into Webkit and from there based Safari.

Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

I’m not sure why they specify “Microsoft’s” mobile browser (sometimes known as Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer Mobile, IE Mobile, Pocket Internet Explorer, PIE, and (by me) That Stupid Clicking Browser), but what they neglected to mention was Opera.  I suppose by “set the standard” they mean “if you add all the Webkit based mobile browsers together they manage to eke past Opera Mini”.  Nice.  Opera Mini is still faster than Safari on an iPhone (so say my friends who have iPhones and LifeHacker).  Raise the bar.

Second, there’s the ‘full web’.

In this case “full web” means “video and games” and a very narrow swath of them at that.  Let’s list a handful of non-Apple supported Internet: FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Matroska.  Full Web ftw!

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Fourth, there’s battery life.

These claims are more or less reasonable.  (Though I have never seen Flash crash a Mac.  I have seen it crash many a browser, however.)  Though this is something that could be left to the consumer.  Freedom of choice just might be more important than security and flexibility more important than reliability.

What they say about battery life may or may not be true.  I am inclined to think it an exaggeration; however, I have neither tested this nor sought out such a test.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.

For example, many Flash websites rely on ‘rollovers’, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot.

I like touching.

The whole Internet “was designed for PCs using mice” because it was designed before the iTouchMyself.

Oh, wait.  The entire Internet was designed before the mouse was ubiquitous.  Shit.  The Internet was originally text based.  Double-shit.  When you send an image through e-mail, your message (including the image) is converted to text and then shattered and sent.  What the fuck?  It is converted back somewhere at the other end where things get reassembled.  In fact, e-mail is a lot like the transporter beam in Star Trek.

And sorry, but you can use mouse-overs in Javascript as well.  Then again Opera Mini doesn’t use Flash and hasn’t.  Yet somehow they have managed to be the dominant mobile Web browser for more than a decade.  Either it’s a miracle or Flash just isn’t that important.

… Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Really?  This is “the most important reason”?  Let me think: how many of my Mac applications run on any other platform?  Oh, yeah: fucking-none!  How about getting those ALAC or AAC files iTunes loves so much onto a non-iPod music player?  No fucking chance.  How about playing FLAC files on my iPod?  Only if I hack the little fucker using RockBox (which I have done and love).  (RockBox will play Apple’s proprietary file types as well, but if you are running RockBox you ought to be running FLAC and Ogg anyway.)

Ring ring!  Uh, yeah, Kettle?  Hey.  This is Pot.  I have some bad news for you…

Conclusions.

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Perhaps Apple “should focus more on” certain open source standards, like FLAC, and give up this hypocrisy.

Damn.

Kisses.

Leave your comments below.

We, of course, have laws about truth in advertising.  However, these laws become useless when one considers that most often advertisers and marketers actually say nothing at all (or at least as close to nothing as possible).

For instance, Internet Explorer 8 was recently unleashed upon the public.  This is the first version of IE which passes the second Acid Test (go here to take the test in your browser).  This is commendable.  Let’s give them a little round of applause.  Ok, that’s enough.  After all, Opera, Safari, and Firefox have been compatible for a very long time (and at least Opera 10 has nearly passed the third test–just need to get the animation smooth and they are done).

Don’t get me wrong, I still think IE is a crappy browser.  (And I hate the click it makes whenever you click a link—”click”, yes I know, I clicked the link!)  But I did get a fine chuckle out of the marketing spin they placed on, really, their passing of this second test.

You see, they have been allowing and encouraging bad code for so long that many Web pages were written badly in order to function in IE.  It is the most popular browser no one has to choose.  So, their crappy browser was rendering all this bad code nicely and was not able to manage the good code.  They had a strong motivation not to pass the second test as they knew this would break many functional pages (or, more aptly, disfunctional pages), so let’s give them a hand for taking the brave step of passing the second acid test.  Oh, never mind; we already did that.

Anyway, as one installs IE 8 a dialog arises upon which I just had to comment and here is that screen shot:

The “Compatibility View updates” represent a mode in which IE 8 will render pages as though it were still IE 7 or earlier.  So the phrase “helps make websites designed for older browsers look better in Internet Explorer 8″ really ought to read “helps make Web sites designed for older versions of our browser look better”.

Even calling it “Compatibility View updates” is a whole lot of nothing.  Compatible with what?  Updates?  What?  How about “Legacy IE Engine Code”?

I’m with Bill Hicks on this one: you marketing people—just stop.  No, really: Just Stop.