You may recall that we’ve been migrating our clients off of Flash already — mostly at their own request. Adobe’s announcement yesterday that they were going to stop supporting a mobile device version of the Flash player will only serve to hasten that. Protestations otherwise, it’s hard to see Adobe’s announcement as anything but a no-confidence vote either in their platform or their ability to sell it. What they’ve done is reinforce in client minds that Flash is a dying technology, and few people want to hitch themselves to that.

Apple certainly thinks the future is in the clouds, but for some of us that future may be more distant than we’d like. During the iOS 5 beta period I played around with cloud backups, both backing up to and restoring from Apple’s remote service. While the idea is nice, you better have a decent internet connection. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting a long, long time for restore.

Continue reading “Why you might not want to back up to iCloud” »

Writing for Wired’s gadget lab, Christina Bonnington starts her comparison of the iPhone 4S and other smartphones thus:

First, let’s compare these guys on what matters most: Their insides.

After comparing the iPhone to the others based on the CPU and battery, Bonnington then moves on to comparing screen size, camera, and network capability. That is, the hardware specs. Some tilt in the iPhone’s favor, some do not.

But she never gets around to the experience of using any of the devices — the thing many people actually do believe matters most.

Continue reading “Why people like Apple (hint: it’s not the specs)” »

There are now lots of eulogies to Steve Jobs. When was the last time the loss of a public figure was this strongly felt? Ronald Regan, perhaps, although I watched that loss from the outside. Jobs is different for me. Tim Berners-Lee may have created my career, but Jobs taught me what computers were for.

Eulogies of Jobs have focused on his determination, his focus, and his 2005 “follow your dream” commencement speech. Those things are great and I don’t want to sell them short. But the fantastic thing about Jobs was that he understood determination and focus were not sufficient tools for following his dream. You don’t get what you want by bearing down and bulling ahead, damn the consequences. You get what you want through slow, incremental, sometimes sideways or backwards steps. Pushing the boundaries rather than flinging yourself at them.

Continue reading “Not just determination, but deliberation” »

Yesterday I said goodbye to all of my Facebook friends. I hope to see them all on Twitter or Google Plus soon anyway, but I don’t expect to have anything to do with Facebook beyond what’s required in an professional capacity. (See also: Social Media Apology.) It’s not because they recently screwed up the way I view the timeline, although that doesn’t help. And it’s not because they continue to follow you around after you’ve logged out, although that was certainly a contributing factor. Heaven knows I’ve voluntarily handed them a lot of personal information.

Continue reading “Why I left Facebook” »

When I switched back to Macs some four years ago I was a little put off by how few options I had. But Peter Bright at Ars Technica says that narrow product line might be the reason Apple is making money.

The question I asked myself: do I want to work on or with my computer? PCs are the obvious choice for tinkerers. I was done with tinkering — especially after Windows Vista. I wanted something that let me get on with want I wanted to do. And so I chose the Mac.

Continue reading “Control and Focus” »

… which is to say “slowly, and not without effort.”

David Woods says on the Modea weblog that there’s still a place for Flash in web development:

Developers should be familiar with both to avoid shunning either technology for the wrong reasons (like hype or trends). Rejoice over having a new tool! Learn about it, evaluate it for individual projects, and don’t get hurt feelings if a favorite technology isn’t the one best suited for the job. Developers should always strive to produce the best solution, not to promote specific technologies. HTML5 and Flash

It’s hard to argue with this, but the cases that require Flash are rapidly shrinking. I once used Flash to build slideshows and fun interactive widgets for web sites. Now I use Javascript. Recently I even used Javascript to build a custom, searchable, interactive map for a York College. It lacks some of the transition niceties a Flash solution might have provided, but web standards development is obviously catching up. That doesn’t bode well for the future of the plugin.

Continue reading “People are dropping Flash like a bad habit” »

The key lesson of Apple under Jobs is that conventional business wisdom and conventional business practice is generally wrong. Tech writers have spent the last decade advising Apple to do the traditional business move. Compete on price. Compete on feature sets. License the iPhone. Stop making hardware. Pay out dividends. Stay out of media. Divest and shut down.

It’s hard to imagine some of that advice now in light of Apple’s market success. And if Apple had been run on a traditional quarterly profit, fear-of-the-shareholder basis, they would have followed that advice. Remained a curiosity or faded away.

Apple is a true capitalist success story. It has been relentlessly innovative, focused, and deliberate. Compare that to Google’s diffuse offerings, Microsoft’s grasping, Hewlett-Packard’s strange lurching about. These are some of the largest companies on the planet.

I look at them and I look at Apple and wonder: why does Apple’s story stand out so much from all of the rest? How did they do everything so right when everyone was convinced they were doing it wrong? Is it just Apple? Or is business school holding us back?

I’m an old vet of OS wars. Back in my day, the question wasn’t Mac Vs. Windows, it was Mac vs. DOS — with a few CP/M die-hards holding on to their Osbournes. Linux was still seven years away when I engaged in my first platform argument.

What I’m trying to say is that OS arguments bore me.

Continue reading “Mobile OS Wars” »

I bet someone read that headline and said “who uses the waterfall model any more?” Plenty of people. If that person was you, congratulations on working in a more enlightened atmosphere. Unfortunately the waterfall model survives, and plenty of organizations still use it in web development either intentionally or by accident. It is, after all, an easy model to just fall into.

The Waterfall model is one of the oldest formal methods for developing software, adapted from (and probably more suited to) manufacturing. The steps of the Waterfall are described in many ways. You can find the classic seven-step description in this Wikipedia article, but I have boiled it down to four:

Continue reading “Don’t program with waterfalls” »