&lt;p&gt;Some good questions &lt;a href="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/01/31/whatIfFlashWereAnOpenStand.html"&gt;from Dave Winer regarding Apple, Adobe, and Flash&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;What if Apple were trying to erase something that&amp;#8217;s not company-owned? Either a formal or de facto standard? Further, what if their alternative were something that was locked-down and owned by a company? Further, what if the company was Apple?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;d say that&amp;#8217;d be a different ball of wax entirely. It would depend, for one thing, on the specific open / de facto standard technology.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But as for open &lt;em&gt;web&lt;/em&gt; standards, the evidence &amp;#8212; actions and shipping code, not just words &amp;#8212; strongly indicate that Apple is a major proponent of them. Apple didn&amp;#8217;t have to release WebKit as an open source project &amp;#8212; they could have kept their extensions atop the LGPL-licensed WebCore private.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2010-02-01"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2010-02-01"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; They&amp;#8217;ve re-written WebKit&amp;#8217;s JavaScript engine from scratch at least twice, and released it all as open source. (Apple has also been aggressive about releasing its advanced non-web developer technology, &lt;a href="http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Conceptual/Blocks/Articles/00_Introduction.html"&gt;like blocks and LLVM&lt;/a&gt;, as liberally-licensed open source.) All of Apple&amp;#8217;s top competitors in the mobile space have either already adopted WebKit or soon will: Android, WebOS, even BlackBerry. Members of Apple&amp;#8217;s WebKit team have been helping drive HTML5 since its inception. In short, I&amp;#8217;d say Apple likes its technology open and its products closed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;E.g., it makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.&lt;sup id="fnr2-2010-02-01"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn2-2010-02-01"&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I do understand &lt;a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/31/ipad-review-comments-naughton"&gt;the fear&lt;/a&gt;. It&amp;#8217;s indisputable that Apple seeks large amounts of control over its products. So it&amp;#8217;s a reasonable question to ask whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a problem. I don&amp;#8217;t think that&amp;#8217;s the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it &amp;#8212; HTML, CSS, JavaScript. No one can tell them what to do with WebKit; they wait for no one to shape and bend WebKit to suit their needs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My feeling is not that Apple seeks total control over all content and software in iPhone OS. I&amp;#8217;d say it&amp;#8217;s more like they&amp;#8217;re providing two well-defined, nice, neat, easily-understood extremes: the totally controlled native Cocoa Touch, and the totally open web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Winer ends with a suggestion for Adobe:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple&amp;#8217;s court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;d be an interesting move, and it would certainly shake things up. But what if the source code to Flash Player is &amp;#8212; as many would wager &amp;#8212; a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It&amp;#8217;s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It&amp;#8217;s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened &amp;#8212; or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE &amp;#8212; the web has already moved on.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2010-02-01"&gt; &lt;p&gt;An earlier version of this article stated that the entirety of WebKit is BSD-licensed. That&amp;#8217;s wrong; the &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML"&gt;KHTML library&lt;/a&gt; that Apple started with is LGPL-licensed, and so therefore is the WebCore component in WebKit. We regret the error.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2010-02-01" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li id="fn2-2010-02-01"&gt; &lt;p&gt;H.264 is an open standard, but admittedly and unfortunately &lt;a href="http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/"&gt;not a free standard&lt;/a&gt;, hence Mozilla&amp;#8217;s opposition to it. My point here is simply that H.264 is not owned by Apple or any other single company.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr2-2010-02-01" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Robert Scoble &lt;a href="http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/30/can-flash-be-saved/"&gt;has a good analogy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant Internet Explorer back then.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these broken links. Just like &lt;a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/apples_ipad_--_a_broken_link.html"&gt;Adobe is trying to say that Apple’s iPad is going to fail&lt;/a&gt; because of its own set of broken links.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn’t work on Firefox? I haven’t.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the standards-based web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans any longer.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Regarding those blue boxes that indicate embedded Flash content in MobileSafari, think of it this way: Who can make them go away?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adobe can&amp;#8217;t. They can&amp;#8217;t put Flash Player on iPhone OS on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apple could, &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash"&gt;but they won&amp;#8217;t&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users could make Apple change its mind by refusing to buy iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads because they don&amp;#8217;t support Flash. That does not seem to be happening. In fact, iPhone sales are accelerating.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Web site producers could do it, by replacing or providing an alternative to the Flash content on their sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/29/porno-flash"&gt;initial reaction to the iPad&lt;/a&gt; seems to be geared toward #3 &amp;#8212; emphasizing publicly that iPhone OS devices are not capable of rendering the (admittedly, substantial amounts of) Flash content on the web today. Good luck with that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe&amp;#8217;s fear, of course, is that #4 is what will happen. And with good reason, since I think it&amp;#8217;s fair to say that we&amp;#8217;re seeing this happen already. Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow &lt;a href="http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703"&gt;made his little poster&lt;/a&gt; showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they&amp;#8217;re missing anything because, well, they&amp;#8217;re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigiphoto/4314276957/"&gt;Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version&lt;/a&gt; of Brimelow&amp;#8217;s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The explanation is simple. Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they&amp;#8217;re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous. Few technologies get to 100 percent market penetration; Flash came remarkably close. A few years ago you could say that, effectively, Flash was everywhere. It made total sense for sites like YouTube and Hulu to go with Flash.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There&amp;#8217;s a big difference between &amp;#8220;everywhere&amp;#8221; and &amp;#8220;almost everywhere&amp;#8221;. Adobe&amp;#8217;s own statistics on Flash&amp;#8217;s market penetration &lt;a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html"&gt;claim 99 percent penetration&lt;/a&gt; as of last month. That&amp;#8217;s because, according to their &lt;a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/methodology/"&gt;survey methodology&lt;/a&gt;, they&amp;#8217;re only counting &amp;#8220;PCs&amp;#8221; &amp;#8212; which ignores the entire sort of devices which have brought about this debate. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That&amp;#8217;s no longer true, and Adobe&amp;#8217;s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What&amp;#8217;s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn&amp;#8217;t care about what&amp;#8217;s good for Adobe. They care about what&amp;#8217;s good for Hulu. Hulu isn&amp;#8217;t a &lt;em&gt;Flash&lt;/em&gt; site, it&amp;#8217;s a &lt;em&gt;video&lt;/em&gt; site. Developers go where the users are.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;h2&gt;Automatic Transmission&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn&amp;#8217;t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;s not to say there aren&amp;#8217;t trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they&amp;#8217;re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it&amp;#8217;ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying &lt;em&gt;computer&lt;/em&gt; is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Popovers and Split Views&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Across the iPad system, Apple has introduced a new UI element, which they&amp;#8217;re calling popovers. It&amp;#8217;s a perfect name. Popovers are like a cross between dialog boxes, drop-down menus, and inspector palettes. One example is the list of mailboxes in Mail when in vertical mode. When iPad Mail is in horizontal mode, you see a split view with two panels at once: accounts/mailboxes/messages on the left, and an always-present message detail panel on the right. When iPad Mail is in vertical mode, you just get one panel, but you can tap a button at the top left to show a popover of messages in the current mailbox.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;They&amp;#8217;re very well thought-out. As their name implies, they appear on-screen &amp;#8220;over&amp;#8221; existing views. But you can&amp;#8217;t drag them around. They aren&amp;#8217;t windows. They&amp;#8217;re in a fixed position, always with an arrow pointing to the button or other control (like an event in Calendar) that the user tapped to open the popover. To close a popover, you just tap away from it &amp;#8212; tapping anywhere other than within the popover closes it. Perhaps conceptually, it&amp;#8217;s more like tapping the view &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; the popover to make it disappear. So popovers don&amp;#8217;t have an &amp;#8220;X&amp;#8221; button in the top-left corner, or anything explicitly labeled &amp;#8220;Close&amp;#8221; or &amp;#8220;Cancel&amp;#8221; or &amp;#8220;Done&amp;#8221;. You just tap away. This is one of those aspects of the iPad UI that you just have to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; to get. It feels perfect.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;According to the iPad Human Interface Guidelines (which, alas, are only available to registered iPhone SDK developers), there is a modal variant:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Popovers and modal views are similar, in the sense that people typically can’t interact with the main view while a popover or modal view is open. But a modal view is always modal, whereas a popover can be used in two different ways:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modal, in which case the popover dims the screen area around it and requires an explicit dismissal. This behavior is very similar to that of a modal view, but a popover’s appearance tends to give the experience a lighter weight.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-modal, in which case the popover does not dim the screen area around it and people can tap outside its bounds to dismiss it. This behavior makes a non-modal popover seem like another view in the application, not a separate state.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#8217;t recall encountering the modal variety during my all-too-brief iPad spelunking expedition; the non-modal ones seem far more prevalent.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The overall effect of popovers is that you do &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; less view switching in an iPad app than you do an iPhone app. Things that slide an entirely new full-screen view on screen on the iPhone &amp;#8212; like say going back from a message to a list of messages, or displaying your Safari bookmarks, or showing the details of a calendar event &amp;#8212; on the iPad instead appear as popovers on a main view.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So imagine, say, an iPad Twitter client in horizontal mode. You could have a split view with a list of tweets running down the left. On the right, you could have a web view for reading web pages linked from tweets. Rather than sliding over and replacing the tweet list, they could exist side-by-side. And then a popover could provide an interface for switching between different accounts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Information Density&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPad display offers 1024&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;768 pixels. At 9.7 inches diagonally, the pixel density is roughly 132 pixels per inch. That&amp;#8217;s less than the iPhone and iPod Touch, which have 480&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;320 displays with roughly 162 pixels per inch. So text looks a little less sharp on the iPad. But it seemed to me that I naturally held it further away from my face than I do my iPhone, such that it seems just about equally sharp &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What I found interesting is that I&amp;#8217;m very familiar with this resolution &amp;#8212; for &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt; I used PowerBooks and iBooks with 1024&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;768 displays running Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X. 1024&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;768 somehow seems very different on the iPad than on Mac OS &amp;#8212; physically smaller but conceptually bigger. The full-screen concept, without Mac-style overlapping draggable windows, leaves the iPad free to use as many pixels as possible for display &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; rather than UI chrome.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;With the iPad Calendar app for example, the month view seemed more efficient and information-dense than iCal running on my 1440&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;900 pixel MacBook Pro display.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Also interesting is iPad Safari. Even though the screen offers the same pixel count as what was once the standard size for a laptop display, iPad Safari renders pages like iPhone Safari. The web surfing experience is all about zooming and panning.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Hardware Keyboard Support&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The announcement that most surprised me is the iPad&amp;#8217;s support for hardware keyboards &amp;#8212; not just the new docking unit, but also Bluetooth keyboards. I&amp;#8217;m surprised because it is a very practical decision, but not elegant. There&amp;#8217;s a certain beauty to how, with the iPhone and iPod Touch, input is completely and utterly limited to the touchscreen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Needless to say, though, I&amp;#8217;m surprised in a happy way. I can totally imagine traveling to conferences (or events like this) without a MacBook, but rather with an iPad and a keyboard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The on-screen iPad keyboard is not bad at all, for what it is, but it&amp;#8217;s exactly what you think &amp;#8212; it&amp;#8217;s for &lt;em&gt;pecking&lt;/em&gt; not &lt;em&gt;typing&lt;/em&gt;. If you want to do actual writing, you&amp;#8217;re going to want a hardware keyboard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Having used the hardware keyboard yesterday, though, it is clearly a secondary form of input. You cannot even vaguely drive the iPad interface by keyboard alone. It is almost entirely only for text input. The arrow keys really only work for text editing. Shift-arrow combos work for selecting ranges of text, and Command-arrow combos work for moving the insertion point to the beginning/end of lines. Option-arrow combos do not work for moving a word at a time, though.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Arrow keys don&amp;#8217;t work for navigating the interface. This is the sort of thing I expect to improve over time (and who knows, maybe even before it actually ships), but there are some glaring holes. For example, in iPad Mail, when you start typing in the To: field to address a message, and the iPhone-style autocomplete suggestion list appears under the field, you cannot select from it using the keyboard. You have to touch the screen. The docking keyboard has no Esc key, replacing it instead with a key to simulate the iPad Home button. But so if you try to dismiss a popover with &amp;#8220;Esc&amp;#8221; and hit that button, boom, you&amp;#8217;re dropped back to the home screen. And once back at the home screen, there doesn&amp;#8217;t seem to be a way to launch apps via keyboard alone. It just seems like it&amp;#8217;s not finished yet.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Typography and iBooks&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPad&amp;#8217;s version of iPhone OS contains more fonts than iPhone OS 3.1, including my beloved Gill Sans. The iBooks app lets you switch the text face, but only from a choice of five fonts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;iBooks uses full-justified layout for books, with no apparent option to switch to ragged right. It doesn&amp;#8217;t do hyphenation, so you wind up with very unsightly word-spacing gaps. No e-reader I&amp;#8217;m aware of does justice to proper book typography, but I was hoping for better from Apple. It&amp;#8217;s decent web-caliber typography, not print-caliber typography.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As for Amazon, they might wind up delighted with this thing. Apple&amp;#8217;s in the business of selling devices first, content second. I think Amazon is in the content business first, the device business second. A world where Kindle hardware sales pale in comparison to the iPad but where there&amp;#8217;s a very popular Kindle app for iPad that competes against iBooks is not a bad situation for Amazon. Apple is only selling e-books for use on their own devices; Amazon is willing to sell e-books anywhere they can.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Money on the Table&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, a thought regarding the iPad&amp;#8217;s aggressive pricing. Apple is obviously leaving money on the table here. They could easily charge $999 as the starting price and have hundreds of people lined up outside every Apple Store ready to buy one on day one. Then they could drop the price later in the year, as the holiday season approaches.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Clearly they&amp;#8217;re more interested in unit sales than per-unit margin. The mobile computing landscape is in land-grab mode, and Apple is trying to stake out a long-term dominating position.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;There was a meta-message in today&amp;#8217;s Apple event, not about the iPad in particular, but rather about Apple as a whole. Jobs&amp;#8217;s brief preamble included a bit of extra emphasis on the fact that the Apple now generates over $50 billion per year in revenue. (Apple also emphasized this $50 billion revenue thing in their &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/25results.html"&gt;PR two days&lt;/a&gt; ago announcing their Q1 2010 financial results.) He also said that when you consider MacBooks as &amp;#8220;mobile&amp;#8221; devices, Apple generates more revenue from mobile hardware than any other company in the world; the three competitors he singled out were Sony, Samsung, and Nokia. The adjective he used was &amp;#8220;bigger&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, there&amp;#8217;s the fact that the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be &amp;#8220;fast&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It is fast, fast, fast. The hardware really does feel like a big iPhone &amp;#8212; and a big &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; iPhone at that, with the aluminum back. (I have never liked the plastic 3G/S iPhones as much as the original in terms of how it feels in my hand.) I expected the screen size to be the biggest differentiating factor in how the iPad feels compared to an iPhone, but I think the speed difference is just as big a factor. Web pages render so fast it was hard to believe. After using the iPhone so much for two and a half years, I&amp;#8217;ve become accustomed to web pages rendering (relative to the Mac) slowly. On the iPad, they seem to render nearly instantly. (802.11n Wi-Fi helps too.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The Maps app is crazy fast. Apps launch fast. Scrolling is fast. The Photos app is fast.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPad hardware is exactly what you think. It looks great, it feels great. It&amp;#8217;s very nice to hold. (People are &lt;a href="http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2010/01/27/apple-drops-an-idud.aspx"&gt;complaining&lt;/a&gt; about the wide bezel around the display, but without that, where would your thumbs go? You don&amp;#8217;t want your thumb that&amp;#8217;s holding the device to cover on-screen content or register as a touch. Trust me, it&amp;#8217;s just right.) Just like with the iPhone, it&amp;#8217;s all in the software. And the software is obviously marvelous in many ways. It is clearly the result of deep thought and hard work.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But: everyone I spoke to in the press room was raving first and foremost about the speed. None of us could shut up about it. It feels impossibly fast. (And our next thought: What happens if Apple has figured out a way to make a CPU like A4 that fits in an iPhone? If they pull that off for this year&amp;#8217;s new iPhone, look out.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t talk much about the technical details of the iPhone. They never talk about CPU speed or the name of the chip being used. They don&amp;#8217;t tell you how much RAM is in there. Part of their vision for moving computers from technical culture to popular culture is about getting away from defining these things by their technical specs. So the prominent talk about A4 is telling. This is something they want us to notice.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I mentioned this year-ago quote from Apple COO Tim Cook the other day, but it&amp;#8217;s apt here, too. &lt;a href="http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc20090621_038917_page_2.htm"&gt;Cook told BusinessWeek&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;#8220;We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren&amp;#8217;t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t just own and control &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world. Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They&amp;#8217;re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they&amp;#8217;re getting into it to kick ass.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;They&amp;#8217;re Microsoft and Intel rolled into one when it comes to mobile computing. In the pre-taped video Apple showed, Bob Mansfield said of the iPad, &amp;#8220;No one else could do it.&amp;#8221; Only Apple.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;And so my takeaway from this &amp;#8212; with the bragging about making their own CPUs and their annual revenue and their size compared to companies like Sony, Samsung, and Nokia &amp;#8212; is that this is Apple&amp;#8217;s way of asserting that they&amp;#8217;re taking over the penthouse suite as the strongest and best company in the whole ones-and-zeroes racket.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Mike Chambers, responding to &lt;a href="http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/"&gt;this piece at Roughly Drafted&lt;/a&gt;, shows that the only mouse events Flash Player doesn&amp;#8217;t have on touchscreens are those for right and middle buttons, and scroll wheels. Hover and mousemove events &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; work. The problem, though, for a hypothetical Flash plugin that renders pages within web pages (as on traditional desktop browsers), is how to tell whether a tap-and-drag within a Flash element is supposed to scroll the entire web page or be passed as a mouse movement event to the Flash element. It can&amp;#8217;t do both, and it can&amp;#8217;t read the user&amp;#8217;s mind. (You can see these problems with straight HTML in MobileSafari today &amp;#8212; it&amp;#8217;s cumbersome to scroll a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;textarea&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; field within a web page because a single finger tap-and-drag within the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;textarea&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; control still scrolls the entire page, not the text content inside the control.) This is one reason why, when you play a movie embedded in a web page on MobileSafari, it always switches you to a full-screen movie player view. Perhaps you could do that with a mobile browser Flash plugin, but except for Flash content that was designed to fit on a small screen, how do you allow the user to both scroll/pan the content &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; pass mousemove and hover events to the underlying content? I&amp;#8217;m interested to see how the upcoming Android Flash Player solves this.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s not so much that you &lt;em&gt;can&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; use mouse-centric UIs on a touchscreen, but that they&amp;#8217;re inherently awkward.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flash Player Content, Mouse Events, and Touch Input’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/flash-touch"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jason Garrett-Glaser, currently lead developer of &lt;a href="http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html"&gt;x264&lt;/a&gt;, on the state of Internet video. Thoughtful, detailed, insightful analysis.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flash, Google, VP8, and the Future of Internet Video’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/garrett-glaser"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Freeverse is a long-standing Mac developer and publisher.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Ngmoco Buys Freeverse’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/ngmoco-freeverse"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Peter Ha, writing for Time:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#8217;s a brand-new decade, and Microsoft is about to leapfrog Apple &amp;#8212; and every other player in the cell-phone world &amp;#8212; with the launch of Windows Phone 7 (WP7).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Filed Away for Future Claim Chowder’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/ha"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Scott Moritz, last month, reported that the &lt;a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/06/analyst-claims-qualcomm-3g-chip-destined-for-verizon-iphone-tablet-based-on-p-a-semi-processor/"&gt;iPhone was going to Verizon this summer&lt;/a&gt;. He also reported, in an &amp;#8220;exclusive&amp;#8221;, &lt;a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/10664179/1/exclusive-apple-tablet-headed-to-verizon.html"&gt;that the iPad would debut on Verizon&lt;/a&gt;. Now, rather than admit to being wrong, he&amp;#8217;s framing it as Apple having delayed it for another year. (&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/macjournals/status/9490154567"&gt;Via MacJournals&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jackass of the Week: Scott Moritz’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/jackass-moritz"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Especially remarkable considering how much more reliable Twitter has been for the last year or so.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Total Tweets Per Day’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/tweets-per-day"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Appended to the bottom of this item by the NYT&amp;#8217;s Dave Itzkoff, regarding David Remnick&amp;#8217;s upcoming biography of Barack Obama:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/02/reader_survey.php"&gt;Via David Kurtz&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Correction of the Week’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/correction"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Free Software Foundation to Google:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world&amp;#8217;s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec &amp;#8212; VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web&amp;#8217;s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;There&amp;#8217;s a chicken-and-egg problem with regard to client-side support for VP8, but that can be solved over time. (Hardware decoding chips, in particular. The reason H.264 playback is so smooth and uses so little power on mobile gadgets like iPhones is because of dedicated hardware.) Google hasn&amp;#8217;t said what they want with On2 and VP8, but it doesn&amp;#8217;t seem silly at all to think that they&amp;#8217;d want to establish it as a truly free and unencumbered video standard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Free Software Foundation&amp;#8217;s Open Letter to Google Regarding VP8’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/fsf-vp8"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Kennedy flat-out lied about his dual-identity as late as Friday. Keizer:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;But on Friday, after I confronted Barth with evidence that linked him to Kennedy &amp;#8212; I didn&amp;#8217;t yet know they were one and the same &amp;#8212; he assured me that although the two had worked together in the past, and in fact, now worked together at Devil Mountain, any allegations that he and Kennedy were the same person were ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Gregg Keizer on Randall Kennedy’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/keizer"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Stream your movies, pictures, and music to your Xbox or PS3 with Rivet. Use coupon DARINGFIRE2010 to receive a 25% discount (this week only).&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/9363515820"&gt;Wil Shipley on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, presumably in response to &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/coldeway"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (and where by &amp;#8220;other platforms&amp;#8221;, Shipley apparently means &amp;#8220;Microsoft Windows&amp;#8221;):&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hmm, @gruber ignores that Flash on other platforms can and does use hardware H.264 decoding, but Apple won’t give Adobe access.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#8217;t mention the issue yesterday, no, but I wrote &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash#performance"&gt;a whole section about it in this piece&lt;/a&gt; a few weeks ago, and I specifically linked to Adobe&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/#FAQ"&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641"&gt;weblog entry&lt;/a&gt; on the issue.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think the issue is a red herring, spin from Adobe intended to share the blame for Flash&amp;#8217;s Mac OS X performance with Apple. First, Flash performance gripes are not limited to H.264 video playback. &lt;em&gt;Everything&lt;/em&gt; Flash Player does is slower on Mac OS X than Windows. What&amp;#8217;s Adobe&amp;#8217;s excuse for Flash&amp;#8217;s performance on non-H.264 video?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Second, even Apple&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html"&gt;QuickTime on Snow Leopard&lt;/a&gt; only &lt;a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2009/06/10/snow-leopard-h-264-hardware-acceleration-and-opencl-requirements/"&gt;makes use of H.264 hardware acceleration with a single graphics card&lt;/a&gt;: the Nvidia 9400M. If you don&amp;#8217;t have that graphics card in your Mac, you don&amp;#8217;t get H.264 hardware acceleration, period. That card is used across the board in current MacBooks and Mac Minis, but there are an awful lot of older Macs in use &amp;#8212; a majority I&amp;#8217;d wager &amp;#8212; which don&amp;#8217;t have that card. It&amp;#8217;s also not present in current brand-new Mac Pros and most iMacs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Third, no one is complaining about the lack of hardware acceleration for other video playback software on Mac OS X, like &lt;a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html"&gt;VLC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://code.google.com/p/movist/"&gt;Movist&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://perian.org/"&gt;Perian&lt;/a&gt;, or even (as mentioned in the previous paragraph) QuickTime itself on machines without the Nvidia 9400M. Even if we concede the point that Flash Player&amp;#8217;s lack of access to H.264 hardware acceleration on Mac OS X inherently blocks it from matching its H.264 playback performance on Windows, I fail to understand how that blocks it from matching the performance of other video playback software on Mac OS X itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Fourth, hardware accelerated H.264 support is &lt;a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf"&gt;a new feature in the as-yet-unreleased Flash Player 10.1&lt;/a&gt;. It in no way explains the performance difference in Flash Player 10.0 on Mac OS X and Windows.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, does anyone really think it would be a good idea for web content plugins to have direct access to graphics card hardware? Is it absurd to think that it&amp;#8217;s a reasonable OS design to limit &lt;em&gt;plugins&lt;/em&gt; to higher-level APIs? Should Flash Player be a kernel extension, so that it can ensure it gets plenty of CPU cycles and have direct access to whatever hardware it wants?&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/"&gt;Macworld Expo&lt;/a&gt; 2010 kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. Is it going to fly without Apple? I don&amp;#8217;t know. I don&amp;#8217;t think anyone does yet. Apple&amp;#8217;s traditional presence at Macworld was so large, both figuratively (with the attention paid to their keynote address) and literally (with their massive booth on the show floor), that their absence has effectively rendered Macworld a new event. I think it&amp;#8217;s smart that IDG moved the date back a month; anything they could do to emphasize that it&amp;#8217;s going to be new and different this year can only help. (I have no idea if it was feasible, but if it had been, I&amp;#8217;d have advised moving the show across the street to Moscone West, just to make it &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; different, too.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#8217;s absence will be felt in two ways. First, the lack of an Apple keynote address has significantly diminished the amount of media attention. That was inevitable. But it wasn&amp;#8217;t really Macworld Expo, the trade show and conference, that was garnering that attention. It was Apple itself. Apple&amp;#8217;s keynotes really didn&amp;#8217;t have much at all to do with the exhibit floor or conference sessions. I suppose there were some number of attendees who considered attending the keynote as a major reason to buy a conference pass, but percentage-wise only a small number of attendees could ever see the keynotes in person. It&amp;#8217;s not like Apple hasn&amp;#8217;t given us much to talk about recently &amp;#8212; hello, iPad &amp;#8212; it just wasn&amp;#8217;t announced at Macworld itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The more worrisome factor for me is Apple&amp;#8217;s absence from the show floor. They had a huge booth in a prominent spot and they drew people in. The role they played on the show floor is very much analogous, I think, to the role played by a big department store like Macy&amp;#8217;s or Nordstrom at a shopping mall.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;To me, though, the reason to walk the show floor has always been about the small companies &amp;#8212; often the &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; small ones. The ones where the employees manning the booth are the engineers and designers who made the product they&amp;#8217;re promoting. I&amp;#8217;ve been to a bunch of Macworld Expos and I never once failed to discover at least one fascinating product by walking the show floor. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In terms of what&amp;#8217;s going on other than the trade show, I&amp;#8217;ve long thought that the inordinate amount of front-loaded attention paid to Apple&amp;#8217;s keynote address drew attention away from the fact that Macworld has turned into a large and successful conference, with tracks spanning everything from programming to graphic design.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Nothing could replace a Steve Jobs keynote address, so, wisely, they&amp;#8217;re not trying. Instead, Macworld has scheduled a &lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/fp"&gt;bunch of featured speakers&lt;/a&gt; throughout the week, including David Pogue, Kevin Smith (yes, &lt;a href="http://www.viewaskew.com/"&gt;that Kevin Smith&lt;/a&gt;), Leo Laporte, and, yours truly. &lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/sessions?s=QSHOWA0005AZ"&gt;I&amp;#8217;ll be speaking Friday at 4:30pm&lt;/a&gt;, where I&amp;#8217;ll share the secret recipes for my award-winning cupcakes and melt-in-your-mouth croissants.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(DF readers: you can register for the show using the discount code &amp;#8220;GRUBER&amp;#8221; to get a &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; expo pass that will get you into my talk (and the show floor, and the other feature presentations). That code is also good for a 20 percent discount on any of the conferences. Just keep in mind that with that code, it&amp;#8217;s &lt;em&gt;totally free&lt;/em&gt; to come see my talk and the other feature presentations.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The bottom line for me is that the potential is there for Macworld to remain a great show. Imagine if there&amp;#8217;d never been a Macworld Expo before, and that this was the first year. It wouldn&amp;#8217;t be surprising that Apple declined to participate. But is there demand for a days-long nerdfest for Mac and iPhone professionals and aficionados? I say yes.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Check out the side-by-side comparison late in the video of the time it takes to launch 10 apps simultaneously from an SSD versus a traditional hard disk.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘SSDs and the MacBook Pro’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/ssd-mbp"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#8217;ll never guess who&amp;#8217;s leading the charges against them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘EU Opens Antitrust Investigation Into Google ’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/eu"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Shaun Inman&amp;#8217;s upcoming iPhone platform game. You collect power-ups not to upgrade your character but to upgrade the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;. Looks glorious.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mimeo and the Kleptopus King’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/mimeo"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Nice interview, and if you haven&amp;#8217;t checked out &lt;a href="http://www.riverfold.com/software/clipstart/"&gt;Clipstart&lt;/a&gt;, you should. (Click the &amp;#8220;Download MOV file&amp;#8221; link to get a nice big H.264 version right in Safari.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Merlin Mann Interviews Clipstart Developer Manton Reece at Macworld’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/merlin-manton"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Paraphrased transcript from Dan Frommer:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple&amp;#8217;s revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could say that is an oil company.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you want to understand Apple Inc., listen to Tim Cook.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tim Cook Q&amp;amp;A Session at Goldman Sachs Conference’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/cook-goldman"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;So great.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Justin Van Genderen&amp;#8217;s Minimalist Star Wars Tourism Posters’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/genderen"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;From the department of tags I never expected to create for DF posts: &amp;#8220;Sexy Apps&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Daisy Mae&amp;#8217; Game Pulled From the App Store; a Few Days Later, It&amp;#8217;s Back In’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/daisy-mae"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My list of the top ten issues facing Apple, presented at Macworld Expo earlier this month. Thanks to everyone who was there &amp;#8212; it was a great audience.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Your Humble Narrator&amp;#8217;s Presentation From Macworld 2010’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/macworld-presentation"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://curvedwhite.com/post/405144449/minimalist-movie-posters-by-eduardo-prox"&gt;Via Curved White&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Minimalist Movie Posters By Eduardo Pox’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/poxsters"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;More information from Mike Chambers on how the Flash Player plugin for Android works with regard to scrolling. The key is that you double-tap to zoom the Flash element to full screen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mike Chambers on Scrolling With Flash Content on Touch Devices’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/chambers-scrolling"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Chait:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;You can imagine how this feels to conservatives. They&amp;#8217;ve already run off the field, sprayed themselves with champagne and taunted the losing team&amp;#8217;s fans. And now the other team is saying the game is still on and they have a good chance to win. There may be nothing wrong at all with the process, but it&amp;#8217;s certainly going to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; like some kind of crime to the right-wing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Coming Conservative Health Care Freakout’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/chait"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Phil Schiller comments to The New York Times&amp;#8217;s Jenna Wortham regarding Apple&amp;#8217;s recent decision to remove sexually titillating apps from the App Store. I like how The Times uses the adjective &amp;#8220;blue&amp;#8221;. (I also love how The New York Times has published an article mentioning an app named &amp;#8220;Dirty Fingers&amp;#8221;.) I &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/porno-app-store"&gt;used &amp;#8220;porno&amp;#8221;&lt;/a&gt; the other day, but that&amp;#8217;s clearly not just what&amp;#8217;s been removed. I think the best adjective to describe what&amp;#8217;s no longer allowed is &amp;#8220;sexy&amp;#8221;. The problem, though (in addition to the fact that saying &amp;#8220;sexy apps are not allowed&amp;#8221; sounds silly), is this:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Indeed, a Sports Illustrated application tied to its annual swimsuit issue was still available for download on Monday, as was one from Playboy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When asked about the Sports Illustrated app, Mr. Schiller said Apple took the source and intent of an app into consideration. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#8217;t see how it&amp;#8217;s anything other than hypocrisy to say that Time Warner can have an app showing swimsuit models and others cannot. I totally understand Apple&amp;#8217;s desire to keep the App Store free of flat-out or even borderline pornography. I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; think it&amp;#8217;s wise to remove/ban R-rated content, though &amp;#8212; isn&amp;#8217;t that exactly what the 17+ rating is for?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But to allow Sports Illustrated and Playboy to publish it and others not? That&amp;#8217;s bullshit.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘NYT: &amp;#8216;Apple Purges Blue Apps From Online Store&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/app-store-sexy-apps"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Frame rates seem good. But it seems like the battery drains noticeably over the course of 6 or 7 minutes. It looks to me like it drops from about 50 to 25 percent in just 8 minutes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;By the way, my big question about Flash Player for Android is whether Google has any plans to include it with the system by default, and if not, which (if any) handset makers do.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Demo Video Showing Flash Player 10.1 on Google Nexus One’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/flash-android"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s how John Dowdell of Adobe &amp;#8220;would prefer Apple communicate&amp;#8221;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Get your CEO to either talk, or not. Put some skin in the game, put your rep on the line with attributed statements. The lack of confirmation, denial, or clarification from Apple PR about rumored quotes from The Great Man is telling.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;What a great idea. Respond to every rumored quote attributed to Steve Jobs with a confirmation, denial, or clarification. I&amp;#8217;m sure Apple will get right on that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘How John Dowdell Wants Apple to Talk’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/dowdell"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Great story.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Find My iPhone&amp;#8217; Rescues Two Stolen Phones at Busch Gardens’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/find-my-iphone"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Philip Elmer-DeWitt, relaying information from unnamed attendees at today&amp;#8217;s Apple shareholders meeting:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Another shareholder then asked a longwinded Q about what Apple/Jobs fears. &amp;#8220;What keeps you awake at night?&amp;#8221; … Jobs deadpans: &amp;#8220;Shareholders meetings.&amp;#8221; Audience erupts in laughter.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Inside Apple&amp;#8217;s Shareholders Meeting’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/jobs-shareholders"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Tim Berners-Lee:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I agree with the WG chairs that these items &amp;#8212; data and canvas &amp;#8212; are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tim Berners-Lee Rejects Adobe&amp;#8217;s HTML5 Procedural Arguments’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/tbl"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Including great families like DIN and Meta. Even better, they &lt;a href="http://blog.typekit.com/2010/02/23/buy-fonts-at-fontshop-host-them-on-typekit/"&gt;work with Typekit&lt;/a&gt; for cross-browser compatibility and ease-of-use.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘FontShop Now Licensing Web Fonts’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/fontshop-web"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Reuters:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sirius XM Radio Inc. posted its first quarterly profit since its merger and said it expected to add 500,000 new subscribers in 2010 as the recovery in the car market boosts demand for satellite radio.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Looks like they&amp;#8217;re going to make it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Sirius Posts Profit, Sees Big Subscriber Growth’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/sirius"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this is the pessimistic take on the &amp;#8220;What happens to Apple post-Jobs?&amp;#8221; question:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Palm is basically Apple, Jr. And if a bunch of Apple geniuses can&amp;#8217;t kick butt on their own at Palm, how are they going to kick butt without Steve at Apple?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;He has a point, insofar as that Palm &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; staffed with many former Apple employees, and, in terms of design and feel and concept, WebOS is the most Apple-like, by far, of any other software platform in the world. But Frommer&amp;#8217;s logical presumption that Palm&amp;#8217;s former Apple employees are interchangeable with those who are at Apple today is headache-inducing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Worse, with regard to mobile, today&amp;#8217;s Palm &amp;#8212; the Rubinstein-led, stocked with former Apple people, WebOS Palm &amp;#8212; only came into existence &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the iPhone debuted. For the sake of argument we can concede that the team at Palm today is just as talented as the team under Jobs at Apple and it still might not be enough to dig the new Palm out of the hole it started in.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As I stated in my talk at Macworld this month, what Apple will be like post-Jobs is simply unknowable. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Dan Frommer Says Palm&amp;#8217;s Decline &amp;#8216;Shows That Apple Is Screwed Without Steve Jobs&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/steve-jobs"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Pushing the limits of per-post art (and code) direction. Geoffrey Grosenbach explains in detail how it works.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘About PeepCode&amp;#8217;s Blog’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/peepcode-blog"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Smart stuff. (&lt;a href="http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/apple_posts_webcast_of_their_presentation_at_the_goldman_sachs_tech_conf/"&gt;Via MacDailyNews&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple Posts Audio From Tim Cook&amp;#8217;s Q&amp;amp;A Session at Goldman Sachs Conference’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/cook-audio"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Very odd, since (a) there doesn&amp;#8217;t seem to be anything even vaguely &amp;#8220;objectionable&amp;#8221; anywhere on the company&amp;#8217;s weblog, and (b) even if there were, what business is it of Citibank&amp;#8217;s?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Fabulis describes itself as a &amp;#8220;network that connects gay men with amazing experiences down the block and around the world&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Citibank Blocks Bank Account of Startup Fabulis, Citing &amp;#8216;Objectionable Content&amp;#8217; on Company Weblog’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/fabulis"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Not good.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Palm Slashes Guidance, Stock Tanks’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/palm"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Exhibition&amp;#8221; or not, this was a great match. I particularly loved the cohesive branding they established.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Khoi Vinh and Nicholas Felton Comment on Their Layer Tennis Match Last Week’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/vinh-felton"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Four months after debuting as the top-of-the-line Android handset, the Droid is now selling on Amazon for just $50 (with a Verizon contract). Still can&amp;#8217;t upgrade it to Android OS 2.1, either. (&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/counternotions/status/9610547225"&gt;Via Kontra&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Motorola Droid Now Just $50 at Amazon’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/droid-amazon"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Pure web app e-book reader for iPhone and Android. Install it on your iPhone home screen and it acts like a regular app, including the use of local storage for your saved books.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Ibis Reader’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/ibis"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s not in the store yet, but there&amp;#8217;s a new &amp;#8220;Explicit&amp;#8221; category in the form developers use when submitting apps.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Oops, maybe not. &lt;a href="http://gizmodo.com/5479497/apple-removes-explicit-option-from-itunes"&gt;Gizmodo is reporting&lt;/a&gt; that the &amp;#8220;Explicit&amp;#8221; category has been removed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘ Apple May Be Adding ‘Explicit’ Section to App Store’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/explicit"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The guys who made the video demonstration of the Flash Player 10.1 beta argue that battery performance isn&amp;#8217;t a problem:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Our own tests show that video can be played for well over 3 hours over Wi-Fi from YouTube in H.264 (Baseline 1.2).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you think that sounds good, note that the Nexus One is &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/googlephone/m/hardware_complete_specs.html"&gt;rated for 7 hours of video playback time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flash Player 10.1 Battery Performance on the Android Nexus One’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/flash-battery"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ashlee Vance, reporting for the NYT on HP&amp;#8217;s failure in the mobile market:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sales of HP&amp;#8217;s hand-held products, including its iPaq smartphone, dropped to $25 million in the quarter, down from $57 million in the same period last year. Apple, by contrast, had sales of $5.6 billion for iPhones and related products during its most recent quarter.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;HP’s anemic performance in the smartphone market has left analysts perplexed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;There&amp;#8217;s nothing perplexing about it. HP doesn&amp;#8217;t have their own mobile OS. Instead they banked on Windows Mobile, and Windows Mobile stinks.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘HP&amp;#8217;s Failure in Mobile Phones’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/hp-mobile"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Now that the whole thing has been posted to YouTube, you can watch from Flash-less devices such as your iPhone or Apple TV, or even sans Flash on your Mac if you&amp;#8217;ve signed up for &lt;a href="http://www.youtube.com/html5"&gt;YouTube&amp;#8217;s HTML5 beta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘YouTube Version of Your Humble Narrator&amp;#8217;s Macworld Feature Presentation’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/youtube-mwsf-2010"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

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