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. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

In addition to the above, there’s also video which: decoding video to display on a computer screen using software requires a lot of the CPU (and kills battery life), while using a hardware-based encoding (H.264) is much more efficient.  Flash didn’t support H.264 until very recently.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. 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.

One of the most intriguing points Jobs makes is the concept of being beholden to a third-party to make updates to their libraries whenever Apple introduces a new technology.  With the speed of changes in the iPhone OS, I can see his point.

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

via Thoughts on Flash.

At the SDK event, Apple gave a number of reasons why they didn’t want to support true background processes for iPhone applications:

1. Having lots of applications running could quickly use up the limited resources and battery on the iPhone, causing performance problems.
2. They didn’t want the user to have to worry about managing active programs with some kind of complicated “Task Manager” interface.
3. If applications could continue to run in the background without any visual cues to the user, it would be that much easier for apps to perform unintended/unrequested operations.

I think there’s a way for the iPhone to provide better support for background applications, without breaking the requirements listed above. Think about what happens when you’re on a call, and you tap the Home button. You can launch applications, and pretty much do whatever you like while still on the call. Here’s what this looks like:

You’re aware that you’re still on a call because of the bar at the top of the display, and you can tap to return to the call if you wish. I think background applications could work the same way, and in so doing wouldn’t break any of Apple’s requirements:

1. Only one app could be in the background at a time, so you wouldn’t have lots of apps hogging the resources of the phone. Yes, you’d have another process using resources in addition to the foreground application, but it wouldn’t need to use any of the graphics framework, and in my experience the iPhone would be powerful enough to handle this kind of limited processing.
2. Nothing is hidden from the user. They know exactly what’s happening in the background because they’re being told at the top of the screen, and can tap that bar to return to the app. Another nice benefit here is that perhaps the application could customize what gets displayed in this line, so an app like Pandora could have the row say “Now Playing: Enter Sandman by Metallica”.
3. No Task Manager is necessary. The way users interact with the background app is intuitive because background phone calls already work the same way.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect solution since only one app is running in the background at once. If you want something to run 100% of the time, then you’d never be able to run an additional background app on top of that. However, I think a system like this in addition to the Notifications framework solves most of the desired use cases for background apps: music playing/streaming, location polling, real-time text updates, and so on.

What do you think? Would this kind of system solve the problems you have with background apps on the iPhone?

First, I thought I’d outline the reasons for an alternative to Gmail.  Let me preface this by making it clear that I love Gmail – it’s a great service, but one that has some inherently odd choices that make it less than ideal for an email-heavy user.  Some of Gmail’s most irksome quirks:

• No such thing as folders.  Instead, everything is tagged, which doesn’t lend itself well to being used inside my mail client
• The “All Mail” special tag appearing in my mail client via IMAP, which appears as though I receive two of every email
• Removes duplicates of messages, which means if I send a message to myself, it will never appear in my inbox (instead, it’s always in my Sent Messages tag)
• Not completely reliable.

In terms of reliability, it’s very important to me that the service is always available, and always fast.  I want to receive messages moments after they’re sent – not hours later.  When checking for messages from my other accounts (via POP), Google uses some heuristics to determine how often it should check for new messages.  Unfortunately, this often means it won’t check for an hour or so, which can be very annoying.

So, I’ve been on the lookout for a Gmail replacement for some time, and thought I had found it in Apple’s revamped MobileMe service.  When it was launched, it appeared that Apple was doing email right, but as I’ve learned from using the service first-hand, I’ve merely traded improvements in some areas, for problems in others.  For instance:

• It can’t check foreign email accounts.  This wasn’t a complete deal-breaker, as I have some clever auto-forward email recipes setup which largely solves this problem.
• There’s no way to send mail as a non-MobileMe email account.  You can create multiple “personalities” that give you different @me.com addresses, but there’s no way to send as a non @me.com address.  This is a huge problem, and means I can’t stop using Gmail until this is added to MobileMe.
• It drives me crazy that the web interface often refreshes the entire page.  If I leave it open in a Safari tab for a little while, then return, it seems to refresh.  That’s annoying.
• Another annoyance factor is that whenever I return to the email interface (or whenever the page refreshes), all of my folders are expanded.  I have a LOT of email, and I keep them fairly well organized into many different folders.  I’d like the system to remember what folders I had kept closed.

I should mention that I am a big fan of the push email functionality I get with MobileMe (and is a major reason why I’m still using the service).  Also, the email web interface is clean and intuitive (and matches the Mail desktop app, which scores major points with me).  Compared to the other major email providers (Gmail, and Yahoo Mail, for instance), the MobileMe email interface wins hands-down.

Apple’s MobileMe is a fantastic service, but I just can’t switch yet.  So many different great features are all aligning to make for a killer email product, but the annoyances I’ve outlined are show-stoppers for me (and why I can’t dump Gmail just yet).  I’m more than happy to pay the MobileMe subscription service if Apple could just get these last few details smoothed out.

What’s your take?  Have you considered switching from Gmail to MobileMe?

The Pandora and AOL Radio apps are designed to allow you to stream radio to your iPhone or iPod Touch.  The introduction of fast 3G Internet access on the iPhone represents a significant threat to satellite radio and, to a lesser extent, terrestrial radio.  Consider the implications.  A user has an iPhone that’s the same size as an iPod (or a Sirius Stiletto) that can stream radio while in the car, walking down the street, or inside a building.  The iPhone can hop onto WiFi networks (same with the iPod Touch) or use 3G.  Even Edge connectivity allows for decent streaming.  All that adds up to great wireless access – as good as, or better than, satellite technology, since 3G and Edge connections work indoors whereas satellite doesn’t.

Accessibility aside, the real advantage is the phenomenal flexibility streaming radio provides.  Take Pandora for example.  It’s a streaming radio program for the iPhone that creates a customized radio station matched exactly to your tastes.  But even the simple ability to skip over songs you don’t like, a basic feature of Pandora, is inherently absent from any pre-programmed content station.  Such a simple feature goes a long way to improving your listening experience, and it’s almost embarrassing in the age of TiVo to not be able to skip over content you don’t find interesting.

With greater accessibility and significantly greater flexibility, streaming Internet radio will become one of the biggest threats to satellite radio over the next few years and will become a killer app for the iPhone.  Cell technology is getting better at providing high-speed Internet access, and already there are a number of very good streaming services that match listener’s tastes to music.  As the iPhone becomes increasingly popular among consumers and access speeds increase, satellite will suffer.  Satellite’s only hope to stay competitive is to offer enough exclusive content that listeners won’t be able to part ways with satellite radio without missing their favorite programs, but even that strategy is tenuous at best – it will only be so long before the content creators themselves decide to head for the greener pastures that Internet streaming radio provides.

1. Rather than restate all the steps I took, I’ll link to this post that I found useful. In particular, configuring Gmail’s Drafts, Junk, Trash and Sent folders to match those in Mail is nice.
2. The way Gmail implements IMAP wasn’t very intuitive to me and took some getting used to. For example, deleting a message from a mailbox doesn’t really delete it, it just removes that label (or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work; more on that later). I found this page helpful in getting used to how IMAP functions match Gmail actions.
3. I know this has probably been discussed ad nauseum, but I wish Gmail would loose the “labels” concept and move to “folders”. While I’ve eventually gotten used to it within Gmail, the problem is only made worse with IMAP. For example, if a message has two labels, you’ll see it in two folders, which means it’ll show as two unread messages.
4. I figured as long as I was setting all this up, I’d use Gmail to backup all my old messages, as described by Ryan. This meant copying over my old mbox files, importing them to Mail, and moving them into the appropriate folders in Gmail. It’s definitely a slow process, but you can view the progress from the Activity window (under Window -> Activity). There were a few times when the moving failed: I believe it was due to cases where messages had very large bodies. Although it failed partway through, I was able to start over without having any duplicate messages, so it looks like Gmail is smart enough not to add an exact duplicate.
5. To help speed the process a bit, I’d recommend turning off caching while doing any importing or moving of messages. This is done under “Keep messages for offline viewing” in the Advanced tab of the Gmail Account preferences. Once everything is set how you like it, you can turn cacheing back on. For a large number of messages the caching process can also take a while.
6. It took me a while to find a setup for my outgoing messages that works for me. In the past, I’ve had my email client set to automatically BCC myself on any emails I send. This way my messages get categorized properly, and my emails will be in the same mailbox as the rest of a thread. With Gmail, my sent messages were getting put into the Sent Mail folder in Gmail, which means I never got a chance to filter them into any labels. BCCing myself didn’t help, since Gmail already had a copy of the message in Sent Items. What I’ve done now is to remove Gmail’s Sent folder as Mail’s Sent mailbox, which means the only copy that Gmail receives is the one that gets BCCed, which means I can have it filtered however I like. Update: Turns out I was wrong on this.  Any email sent through Gmail’s SMTP will be added to “Sent Mail”, so BCCing won’t help.
7. An unfortunate annoyance with Gmail IMAP is that unless you have a message filtered to automatically archive (in Gmail context this means moving it to “All Mail”), it’ll show up twice in Mail: once in the Inbox, and once in “All Mail”. So far I haven’t found a way to avoid this.
8. The filters in Gmail are rather basic and limited, especially compared to Mail. For example, I don’t think there’s any way to match messages whose subjects start with a string, instead of just containing the string.
9. Rather than set up a complex set of filters for all the email I get, I got an idea from Ryan to only create filters for less important messages, like automated log messages. Anything important will to go my inbox, and then I can choose how to label it or to delete it. This also has the benefit that on my iPhone, I can just check my Inbox and have important new emails in one place.
10. Although Google Help says that deleting a message will just remove its label, it won’t necessarily work this way in Mail. Although deleting a message will remove the label (or if it’s in the Inbox, archive it), moving it to the Trash will actually put it in the Trash, which puts it in line for deletion. I think you could prevent this by not having Mail’s Trash mailbox be Gmail’s Trash, but the whole “deleting a message to remove the label” feature isn’t something I really need to use.
11. I love the new Todos in Mail, but getting them working in Gmail also required some changes. From what I can tell, you can have Mail store the Todos locally or on Gmail (although there doesn’t seem to be a simple Preferences change for this). If it’s on the server, each Todo is stored as an email, and if you want to specify a Calendar for an item, it means defining a new set of Calendars in iCal. If you store the items on the server, each corresponding message shows up in a nice human readable format, but unfortunately on the iPhone all you see is a Mime attachment. Hopefully in the future Apple will provide a simple way to access Todos on the iPhone.
12. Reading back on these notes, I see how complicated Gmail IMAP can be! I don’t think it’s quite ready for average users yet. That said, it’s nice to know that 1) I now have all my email accounts coming to one place, 2) my old emails are backed up online, and 3) I can access all my email from my computer, my phone, or a browser.

It’s currently being repaired now, which means I’m stuck using an old machine until I get it back (an aging Windows Pentium 4 I had). It’s tough going back to Windows now that I’ve been used to the Mac for so long, but I’m still able to get work done. I’m using Gmail for my email (I had set it up to automatically download all of my work email to Gmail before my Mac died, so I have most of my important messages there), the e text editor, which is very similar to TextMate, WinSCP (to replace Cyberduck), and Putty for my terminal.

When the MacBook died, I was getting very nervous, as I had a deadline (today) for a client. I brought the laptop to the Apple Store nearest me, and they helped me get the documents I needed off the drive before sending it in for repair (they pulled out the drive and inserted it into another MacBook, as I had FileVault turned on – big mistake – where I was able to plug in my external USB hard disk and trasfer the docs I needed). That was way cool, and extremely helpful, as I wasn’t able to get it to boot into target mode.

So, long story short, I should have it back early next week. First problem I’ve had with it, and luckily I had all my important documents backed up (and I met my deadline!). So the process was about as painless as it could have been, and I should have it back early next week.

Update: I got my Macbook back from Apple.  It powered on and was working fine until I went to plugin the power adapter.  Turns out the light on the power adapter (green or orange) doesn’t light up, and it doesn’t charge my battery.  Very frustrating, so I brought it back to the Apple Store, which they are now repairing (again).

My MacBook has been the best all-around laptop I’ve yet owned, and based on my experiences, I’d highly recommend it to anyone considering buying a new laptop.  My next purchase will probably be a Mac Mini towards the end of the year.