Found on Fastcompany, this is simply genius. We haven’t posted that much about the Gizmodo “thing”, but this one is seriously worth it. Check it out after the break.

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The man has spoken. Steve Jobs himself has in fact posted his thoughts about the Flash platform in a pretty long “open letter to the community”, available here.

The post is interesting and worth checking out in its entirety, but just to sum up Steve’s thoughts:

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

Steve’s main concern is that Flash is a closed platform, with crappy performances on mobile devices and that can seriously cut the battery life of Apple’s devices. Overall, it seems like the whole letter is focused on mobile devices rather than desktop computers:

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

and

“Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.”

Now the situation gets very interesting. We’ll wait for a response from Adobe now.

Patently Apple has find out that Apple has filed trademarks for 13 iPhone OS icons: Music, Phone, Compass, Texas Hold’em, Photos, Movies, Notes, Mail, iPod, Maps, World Clocks, Messages and Calculator.

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Apple has won a patent for a multi-touch gesturing system that involves virtual keyboard or large surface computer, Patently Apple reports. The application was filed in 2006 and granted 2 days ago, you can check it out here.

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Available on Battle.net only for those who made it into the beta and for north american servers. Good news.

The war between Apple and Adobe continues, but there are good news for Flash on Mac OS X today: Adobe has released a preview build of Gala, a version of Flash Player that has access to low level H.264 hardware decoding. This version is aimed at developers, but you can go install it here.

From the press release:

“Users will be able to enjoy a much smoother viewing experience when accessing rich, H.264 video content built with the Flash Platform from popular sites like Hulu.com or YouTube.

The Gala preview release is an opportunity for developers to preview this functionality and to test compatibility with existing content on supported Mac computers. We want your feedback to help improve this feature, which is expected to ship following the release of Flash Player 10.1.

In this preview release, you will be able to recognize when hardware decoding is in use when you see a small white square appear in the upper left corner of a video.”

[via]

We know that Tweetie has been bought by Twitter, and should be released soon in the App Store under the name of “Twitter for iPhone”, but Loren decided to release a little surprise for us, available now in the App Store.

The latest (and maybe last) update for Tweetie 2 contains a sort of slot machine, and if you manage to win the game an image will appear telling you that Twitter for iPhone will be available soon. Check out the screenshots after the break.

Goodbye, Tweetie.

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Shopping days for Steve: after the acquisition of Intrinsity, it seems like Apple has bought Siri, the virtual personal assistant also available for the iPhone.

Basing on this FTC document, the transaction has been granted on April 27th.

If you haven’t ever tried Siri before, we’ve embedded a preview video after the break. I can see the acquisition of Siri as a clear way for Apple to enter in direct competition with Google in the mobile search field, considering the technology behind this app - you can basically search for restaurants, cinemas, bands and more by using your voice. It’s a revolutionary and, most of all, working to get things done in a natural way and I won’t be surprised at all to see this implemented in a future version of Voice Control. In the meantime, the app is still available here.

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According to iPhoneinCanada, Apple has sent the first build of Mac OS X 10.6.4 to some known developers.

“The current build focuses on Graphics Drivers, SMB, Time Machine backups, USB, and VoiceOver. The build does not include any further updates or enhancements.”

We’ll keep you posted about it, but you can be sure that it’s going to take several months - pretty much like 10.6.3.