Once upon a time their was young Steve Jobs and he fearlessly forged ahead and helped shape the landscape of today’s personal computing. To tell you the truth Macintosh was for the most part based off of the work that was done at PARC ( Palo Alto Research Center ) at the time PARC was run by Xerox. The wonderful people at Xerox worked night and day on LISA which was the first GUI (Graphical User Interface) for personal computing. Some of the brightest luminaries in Computer history worked at PARC like Alan Kay the father of OOP. This was at a time though when most people had no idea that personal computing would explode. Most of the people that were employed at PARC were of course heavily influenced by Douglas Engelbart who ran the Human Augmentation Project at SAIL ( Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ). At this time in computing people believed that AI (Artificial Intelligence) would be everything because evidently the common man was believed to simply be too stupid to use computers in everyday life. You had a few mavericks at the time that of course did not subscribe to this ideology this group developed the first mouse and many of the interface devices we still use today in the late sixties at Stanford under the guidance of Engelbart. The interface that was developed at PARC had many of the same features that Engelbart’s Human Augmentation project had created the precusor to the LISA interface and at this time Piracy really wasn’t considered a crime. At this time you also had people in the valley that were bright enough to pick up on the fact that the rate of Computing Power was exponential and it was doubling every two years this of course later became known as Moore’s Law. Douglas Engelbart understood this fact and predicted things like the pocket library which is now pretty much your smart phone or iPad. Steve Jobs has been extremly successful in making his childhood dreams a reality. This of course only came about with failure and constant work, ambition to push things further and further and he has radically changed the history of personal computing for the most part for the betterment of all mankind. Although Steve Jobs beginning was literally taking LISA’s beginning from Xerox and refitting it to the Macintosh. Simply because the people at Xerox had no idea of the caliber of intellectual property they owned at the time sad really. It was somewhat shady business moves like this that literally spawned personal computing.
Recently though Apple has made in my mind some rather bothersome decisions. I fully understand them not wanting to include Flash as a part of their ecosystem. This definitely comes from the need to dominate their platform and insure the sales of apps on the iTunes store. If everyone had the flash player would so many apps actually be sold?? I don’t believe they would be. Up until now Apple devices have had relatively low computing power but this is no longer the case with the iPad. Lots of developers have banded together and created some really cool tools out their like Unity3D, Corona SDK, Appcelerator, etc which by the way really creates a considerable amount of those casual games you play on your iPhone. Recently Apple announced they would not allow 3rd party tools to compile to the iPhone / iPad. This is extremely troublesome for developers. I will be honest I love technology and for the most part I consider myself technologically agnostic as in I don’t really believe that one Technology is the complete answer. I am completely for learning new technologies, languages etc. I like Objective-C have played around with it a little and I also own several books on it. I also like other technologies like Flash and when Adobe mentioned they were bringing the ability to compile directly to the iPhone / iPad I was of course elated. The reason why is quite simple I want to utilize existing skills and compile to as many platforms as possible with a minimal amount of rework to get applications to work on a given device and honestly when it comes to this Adobe has that game down! The flash community as a whole have spawned some of the coolest user interfaces ever put together period. As a whole this community has really helped shape the future of computing and User Experience. Many of the features of the current JavaScript libraries have been around in the flash community for years. I mean you have to kind of laugh to yourself when the JavaScript community mentions something like easing these techniques were really defined well in the flash community and all you have to do to see this is simply do a Google search on Easing Equations you will find Robert Penner at the top. I love both technologies and I really don’t want to be in one of those childish conversations where to whiners, whine about which one is better and which one will when over. It is a silly argument to have in the first place. As a developer it is important to have knowledge of both and not let your opinions cast doubt on one or the other platform. HTML5 will advance to where flash is now but when it does flash will be well beyond where it is today. So I guess I am upset at Apples decision to really kind of flip the bird to the development community and tell everyone they can only use their tools to create content or they have to use HTML5. To be honest with you, I have been thinking about using HTML5 simply to escape the whole Apple approval process. I will definitely be putting my weight around HTML5 and Flash for all the other Mobile platforms. The people at Adobe are not lazy Steve. They worked extremely hard to put together something that they believed would help your iTunes app store and consumers as well and it is not just the people at Adobe you have alienated by this decision.
With the people at Apple making decisions like this you can’t help but wonder how far they will reach to control content. I believe that content is up to the user hopefully they won’t extend policies like this to their bookstore. Really the fact of the matter is people will purchase these devices in mass numbers because it was created by Apple and Apple does have a killer marketing strategy and team. They won’t so much think about the lack of freedom or the buyer lockin to the iTunes ecosystem. In many ways their ecosystem for entertainment is ridiculously far ahead of the competitors. In short it is nothing short of a Monopoly you may not see it yet but it is definitely there. On the other hand their moves may force the development community to swing to Microsoft and Google the HP Slate doesn’t look half bad. I know, I will be developing for the iPhone and iPad I was just in the hopes to speed up my process I guess that looks like it is no longer an option. I will in fact have to recreate the whole experience just for that device.
I wonder if the young Steve Jobs would do what he is doing today?
Well on a side note next weekend I might be posting code for a Twitter Spider created with Silverlight. Silverlight is cool! I am of course looking forward to the Windows 7 phone and Visual Studio 2010!
Oh and last time I mentioned RayCasters Bruce Jawn released his source code for Alchemy compiling of this RayCaster you can find the code here! On his site you can find some cool examples of how to use Alchemy for Flash Development.
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