Links for Monday April 12th, 2010
Apple's wager: To put it another way, Apple is going to do things as they see fit, so long as sales are up. But if people start to become unhappy with design decisions, missing features, or locked-down devices and sales drop, only then will Apple respond to external pressure and change.
The devil you know: Interesting perspective on the power of innovation from Jonathan Rentzsch.
All About the Framework: I'm not entirely happy with Louis Gerbarg's piece (as compared with John Gruber), and it seems like Michael Tsai is more on the right track. He concludes:
"If Apple had simply said that Flash was banned, in any form, they would have achieved their goal, and the rules would be clear. But Apple didn’t want to say that, so they came up with the messy ideas of no interpreters and originally written in Objective-C. This seems like an impossible line-drawing problem, so I think we can expect more convoluted, post-hoc rules and discretion going forward—and, thus, more risk for developers."
Even if you write straight Objective-C, section 3.3.1 is a problem.Steve Jobs Confirms Lack of Future Support for Original iPhone: I can understand, from an engineering perspective, why Apple wants to not support old hardware. But this decision kindof stinks — the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G are practically the same thing, hardware wise. If iPhone OS 4 supports the iPhone 3G, original iPhone support should more or less come along for free.
To put it another way, my 3+ year old Mac runs the latest version of Mac OS X, but my 2.5 year old phone is going to be locked out from the latest iPhone OS come summertime.
Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video: While this is cool and all, I think that H.264 has won the HTML5 video codec war, due to the fact that there are hardware-based H.264 decoders (used in all video capable iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices, for example). Due to how many of these devices are being sold, any new codec that's trying to get started now is too little, too late. I think the solution to get Firefox to support H.264 is to get the MPEG-LA to provide licenses to all the relevant patents, for free, to open source software.
Letter to Steve Jobs: Corey Johnson's short but well-written open letter regarding the hubbub over languages allowed for developing iPhone applications.