The reported change to Flash Player's fate is with the mobile version Flash Player, but it raises doubts about the personal-computer version, too.

This makes me smile. The web is going to suck less and we can move forward.

Steve Jobs was right about the floppy, serial, and parallel ports. He was right about Flash.

The masses in IT, so focused on preserving the status quo and unable to see the big picture are the ones that come out looking like total horses' asses today. That's because, well, they are. IT is overrun by them and in the enterprise, well, the horses's asses infest all ranks and far more often than not, call the shots. That's why consumer IT is driving today's innovation and why, thankfully, geeks are no-longer the tech taste-makers.

On Thursday, Narayen said of the episode with Apple: “Yes, the argument is over from our point of view. ” He added, “We are so excited about opportunities we have. We’re focused on that.”

An Apple spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Jobs has endorsed an emerging standard on the Web called HTML 5, which is being developed by a consortium that Apple is a part of, alongside Google.

Narayen said Adobe now “welcomes the evolution of HTML and are actively contributing to it” with typographic and design expertise. He downplayed how much Flash contributes in revenue to Adobe, calling it just a “small part” of the company.

Narayen added: “At the end of the day, where Adobe makes its money is through our application tools, as well as our solutions, (and) being able to make that content and measure that content and manage that content.”

Translation: Adobe knows this is fight they cannot and will not win. This is a great day for the Web, and hopefully will be the first day of an era where we're not faced with a Web hobbled by plug-ins.

Unfortunately, most phone users don’t have the patience for bugs that hardcore geeks like myself do. Sometime this week, either Verizon or I will get an angry call from my mom when she tries watching a Flash video that locks up the screen or plays a Flash game that won’t respond because it expects a mouse clicks rather than finger taps. Both of us will probably advise her to disable the plug-in so we won’t get called again and she won’t see Flash again.

If Adobe can’t make its mobile plug-in work effectively with all Flash content, it needs to at least warn users and give them the option to cancel before it downloads and attempts to play a game or video that isn’t compatible with Flash Player 10.1 for phones. Popping up a cryptic message that says “this video isn’t optimized for mobile” after it starts buffering is not acceptable.

More importantly, Adobe needs to have a better answer to whether or not Flash  is still relevant in a world where other technologies have rapidly started displacing it.  Based on my early experience with Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, it could soon join the floppy drive in the tech graveyard, something else Steve Jobs helped kill.

People just need to let this technology die and admit, as hard as it may be for them, that Jobs was right.

You could call it the perfect storm.

Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd

has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s

Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.

In early May, Scribd announced its plans to ditch Adobe’s Flash and began the arduous process of converting every document (of its “tens of millions”) to native, HTML5 pages. “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash, “co-founder and CTO, Jared Friedman, told Erick Schonfeld. Although many documents on the web are still boxed into Flash players, the HTML5 format turns them into rich, interactive web pages.

That gamble has paid off handsomely for Scribd. Although the number of unique visitors still stands at roughly 50 million per month, those users are spending significantly more time perusing documents and sharing with friends.That growth in user engagement has rapidly accelerated in the past month. On May 25, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Friedman said user engagement had doubled— implying strong acceleration in the last three weeks.

The HTML5 play has also made Scribd’s product very iPad friendly and iPad users are responding in kind. According to Adler, although iPhones clearly outnumber iPads in the wild by a large margin, the number of users accessing Scribd through the iPad is now roughly equivalent with the number of users who are using their iPhone.

Now that the company has its HTML5 and iPad strategy in place, Adler says they are focusing on making Scribd more social and less reliant on search engines. Today, the majority of their traffic comes from Google, but Scribd is putting a greater emphasis on the social by closely integrating with Facebook.

Earlier this year, Scribd revamped its Facebook Connect option (enhanced content sharing and added an activity feed plug-in) and introduced Readcasting, which automatically tells your social networks, like Twitter and Facebook what you’re reading. According to Adler, those initiatives are growing: the number of people who are auto-Readcasting is increasing by roughly 10% each day and daily subscriptions to other users is up 15x (in the last three months). Quick video with Adler above.

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CrunchBase Information

Scribd

Website:	scribd.com
Location:	San Francisco, California, United States
Founded:	March, 2007
Funding:	$12.8M

Scribd is the world’s largest social publishing and reading website. The company claims more than 50 million readers every month and houses more than 10 million documents, including best-selling books, research reports, recipes, presentations, and… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

I'll say it again. Flash is the new floppy/parallel port/serial port.

At least Apple is a company with the guts to make a stand and drop a technology that is past its time. By comparison, look at the others who keep including technology long past when they should. My NEW Dell workstation at work has a floppy bay, a parallel port, and a serial port. It's 2010. Companies like Dell are gutless and have no soul. Like 'em or hate 'em, that can't be said about Apple.

We've always ported our apps simultaneously to both platforms.

Ahem....

Premiere

...and while we're at it...

Photoshop Elements

Adobe's been digging their own grave for a while. Apple just happened to plant the headstone there for them. Now, Adobe seems to be digging even more furiously than ever.

I think it’s a mistake for anyone to consider themselves a “Flash developer.” It’s like a contractor saying he’s a “hammerist” or a “screwdriver tuner.” If you tie yourself to one tool, you’re bound to get bitten in the ass at some point.

Bingo.

If you're not willing to learn and use different technologies, then you're no IT professional.

Adapt & learn or change your business card to read "hammerist."

May 06, 2010

Lights out for Flash and its RIA brethren

Apple's ban on Flash for the iPhone is another nail in the coffin for proprietary RIA platforms -- and good riddance

Good riddance, indeed.

Adobe says Apple is stifling competition by barring developers from using Adobe’s products to create applications for iPhones and iPads, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the case.

It's more like Apple's stifling mediocrity.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

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.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

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. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

This cuts to the core of not only why Flash won't be a permitted dev tool for the iPhone OS, but also why tools such as MonoTouch shouldn't be allowed either.