Steve Jobs Posts His Thoughts On Flash

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.

iPad “Spirit” Jailbreak Coming Tomorrow?

There’s been a lot of buzz around this new jailbreak tool called “Spirit”, which should be able to jailbreak every device on the market: iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS, iPad WiFi and 3G, iPod Touch 1G, 2G and 3G. It should be an all in one solution for all those who want to install Cydia and enjoy the apps and utilities banned from Apple.

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New Flash Player “Gala” Brings H.264 Hardware Decoding

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]

Tweetie 2 Updated, With A Surprise

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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