New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

Ok, this is like the third or fourth time I've read this from the Apple camp. I've been making websites in Flash for around ten years now but just doing it freelance/learning on my own time/etc. Would I be able to do the same kind of script-based animation controls in HTML5? Does anyone here have any experience with the two and would it be relatively easy to pick up HTML5 for someone that has 10 years experience with Flash (3 all the way up to CS3)?

'Relatively easy' in the sense that given a weekend I was recently able to learn Actionscript 3. I'm no programmer tho!

i'm pretty sure you can use the CANVAS tag to do a lot of that. IANAFD though. This article's a good intro -

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/get-ready-for-html-5/

Apple is saying this in the hope that if they say it enough times it will happen. One thing that is lacking is a set of development tools to rival Adobe's flash offerings. Flash may well be a heap of junk* but it is easy to develop for and there is massive installed based of developers.

Apple may of course be able to do something along these lines, add something to Xcode, but it hasn't shown any sign of this. Google could do something along these lines. I find it very interesting that HTML 5 has been Google's route to getting voice onto the iPhone and I saw an interesting piece (wired or Ars, I forget) saying that the future of apps for devices like these is cloud based and using HTML 5 rather than through Apple's walled garden model.

*When Steve Jobs says that Mac crashes are more often than not caused by Flash, he is not wrong, I don't think I've had a crash caused by anything else recently.

Yeah Flash is actually a whole lot of fun to develop sometimes because it feels more like making and animation than making a website...

most of these seem to work on my copy of Firefox -

http://html5demos.com/

clearly it has no future as a mechanism for playing videos. and for more complex stuff, there may be no alternative for now, and there are a lot of developers who would like to see it stay, but in a future where the majority of casual users (and who else uses flash-driven sites) cannot see your site, does that even matter?

Dashcode is quietly getting better and better; it's not what you're talking about, but if they felt the need they could turn it into one. Or Adobe could sense what's happening and work on HTML5 tools, instead of betting on IE never changing.

During his Q&A Jobs was apparently also getting wistful about the old, good Adobe, back when they rocked. If Adobe could go through an Apple-style recovery it'd be amazing. Right now, it's packed solid with lose and Macromedia people with chips on their shoulders, though. xxp

it is absolutely insane to me that there is still no good, affordable multitrack audio editor for apple macintosh computers

adobe has people who get it, and if they can spread the attitude that created lightroom, particularly among the ex-macromedia divisions, then i don't think a turnaround from being microsoft-but-with-cs-instead-of-office, i.e. a return to relevance, is out of the question.

At this point I wouldn't mind even Silverlight gaining more traction, just on reliability grounds, but again I'm not sure if it does much other than playing videos.

http://www.betalogue.com/images/uploads/adobe/Adobe-Updater-Details.gif

Mr Hand, I thought it had disappeared when we last spoke, but it still seams to exist. Have you checked out MOTU audiodesk?

post-flash video is a still a bit of a shambles, but how would silverlight uptake would improve things? what do you mean by "on reliability grounds"? browser support?

i thought you had to buy a MOTU audio interface to use it...

Video has always been and probably always will be a hopeless shambles. There is nothing the video industry loves more than breaking 'standards'.

not sure that's true. at the pro level and for commercial home distribution (itunes, netflix, etc.) it's pretty settled. and on the web it's been fine for the past ~5 years while flash has been the de facto standard. there's going to be a transition period now though, sure, but the standards are there.

(all of this ignores the nonsense encodings you find on torrent sites.)

adobe has people who get it, and if they can spread the attitude that created lightroom
Yeah, Adobe's always had people who get it, it's just that they're crushed under all the marketers, idiots and Macromedians. Lightroom's a great example: it had been in skunkworks for more than a year, and was considered pretty much dead because mgmt didn't want to encroach on PS. Then Apple previewed Aperture, and suddenly a beta programme was kicked into gear. Then they renamed it Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, just for something to do.

At the pro level its a hairy mess. Shares in Transcoding companies are the best bet in pro-video IMO. Flash has done a great deal to improve things at the consumer end which is one of the reasons it would be better for all concerned if Adobe just fixed it. However it is by no means a standard, Netflix uses Silverlight, its a streaming format not a storage format so it doesn't work on PMPs. It's not the standard on Blu-Ray for main content, extras or online content. Satellite, terrestrial and cable delivery are different again and vary with geographic location and sub carrier content such as "red button" stuff varies by platform.

That everything works as well as it does is an eternal surprise to me. True the consumer is largely insulated from this mess, again largely by flash on the web. However the underlying combinatorics of Codecs, Containers, DRM and Delivery mechanisms is staggeringly mind boggling.

how do u insert a landscape oriented page into a pages doc?

you can't, i don't think: looks like all the pages have to be the same orientation. you can choose landscape at the start, or in page setup

w
t
f

Same as InDesign!

Although with DTP Tools' Page Control plug-in you can have every page a different size. Unfortunately it doesn't work with the most kick-ass extension, Triple Triangle's Mechanical Cubed.

So it seems that you can only buy audiodesk with a motu interface but it works with anything that works with coreaudio, which is dumb.

doesn't pretty much every interface come with some software? Or do they just come with Audacity?

I'm going to assume Audiodesk is pretty cool, because I happen to be a Digital Performer user/owner. That's right, I even paid for the thing.

What about Cubase Essential or Logic Express or all those other programs?

It's iPad ordering day.

http://images.macrumors.com/article/2010/03/28/212928-imixr_500.jpg

hope that's not the best they can do! Somebody's gotta come up with a pro-level dj app for the ipad. For that matter somebody should for the ipod/iphone as well. The main problem is always the lack of two outs. How about an ipod/iphone/ipad dock to dual RCA jacks for cue and main? Though if there was software good enough I'd be happy to just use two ipods.

iPhone 4.0 spec news:

-Multitasking(7 API’s to developers)
– Background Audio
– Voice Over IP
– Background Location
– Local Notifications
– Push Notifications
– Task Completion
– Fast App Switching
-5x Digital Zoom
-Spell Check
-Bluetooth Keyboards
- Folders for Apps (like stacks on Mac)
- Home Screen Wallpaper

developed multitasking just so they could serve us ads?

http://www.macworld.com/article/150449/2010/04/liveupdate.html

does ne1 know if they're releasing a developer preview of the os today or just the sdk

From that Macworld link:

11:12AM: DanF: InfoWorld: Any change in Apple's position on Java or Flash? Jobs: No.

dev preview out today

ick
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/04/iphone-os-4-0068-rm-eng.jpg

That's actually a picture of me over lunch

http://onlygizmos.com/content/2010/04/APPLE-IPAD-red-apple-e1270359707281.jpg

downloading the beta OS!!!!

i will report back and and all emotions felt while using iAds

any and all*

Never updated my 1st generation Touch to OS 3.0 - hopefully a fraction of the features can make it over. No reason stuff like customizable home and lock screen wallpaper shouldn't be available.

http://img.skitch.com/20100408-c2w7sra9a4y2ua6hrgu79a33kw.jpg

iPad isn't half bad, btw.

Sent from my iPad.

Multitasking works really well. Rebuilt Zing to use it (and fix nasty 4.0 bug) and it's weird how it just loads up exactly where it was, hours later.

I haven't played an iPhone game that kept me interested for more than a day or two. Even Angry Birds and Implode lack replayability - once I was done I didn't really care to go back and try for more stars/higher difficulty.

uh try Orbital on supernova mode

but don't say i didn't warn you

haha yeah

I am v. v. bad at Orbital Supernova. My high score is 26 - I think I'm missing something re: strategy.