Malum Elegans

“Regulators, this person said, are days away from making a decision about which agency will launch the inquiry,” author Josh Kosman wrote. “It will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kills competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can run only on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform neutral, and can be used on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Microsoft and Research In Motion.”

So let me get this straight: Apple deciding what can or cannot run on their own proprietary platform somehow constitutes an antitrust issue? Okay. Fine. Let’s accept that giant dungheap of logic for a moment, and completely forget the fact that HTML5 webapps are 100% platform agnostic (except for Microsoft’s phones, but that’s pretty much due to Microsoft’s advanced case of Not Invented Here Syndrome regarding WebKit).

Accepting for the moment that Apple is doing something wrong by maintaining the quality of their own platform and accepting also that HTML5 doesn’t exist, there’s still one huge problem with this scenario: Flash is in no way a cross-platform solution for mobile applications. There are two ways in which it could be:

1. Flash apps could run in-browser on all current smartphones. Unfortunately for this argument, they don’t. They don’t run in-browser on one current smartphone. At some point in the near future, a known-to-be-slow version of Flash will be available for certain Android phones. That is in no way a cross-platform solution.
2. Adobe could compile Flash apps for all current smartphones. This is also blatantly not the case. CS5 includes the ability to compile and bundle Flash applications for the iPhone. Only the iPhone. Unless CS6 is coming out tomorrow and includes support for compiling and bundling for Windows Phone 7 and Android, Adobe has done absolutely nothing to improve developers’ cross-platform workflow. Apple’s refusal to allow Flash-based apps, as a result, is equally irrelevant.

Developers are still free to develop native version of their applications for any platform they wish. If they want to develop decent, platform-agnostic mobile applications, well… here’s the only IDE they’ll ever need. Or get.

EDIT 1: Flash has been demoed on the Droid, but is not yet available to the general public; according to Michelle Perkins of Adobe, it’s on course for “the first half of this year”.

EDIT 2: Certain Android phones, including the HTC Hero, do apparently support a slow, Windows-y version of Flash. Unfortunately, the marketing and general availability of this feature is unclear, which makes it hard for me to be sure which phones support it and how well. If anyone has one of these phones and wants to share how it works, I’m all ears.

Timo Vuorensola, Why I left Facebook:

Quitting FaceBook over the Like-button was not the main reason – if it was, I wouldn’t be using Google’s services, or basically any other social network out there. The thing is, I just don’t like their style. FaceBook is like the hunkiest douchebag in the bar. You know the type, the guy with enormous muscles and fake tan and bleached teeth. He gets to act just as badly as he wants, but there’s still always people swarming around him. Sometimes big online services just go into that path and never come back, and I don’t need that kind of shit around me.

The whole piece is possibly worth reading.

EDIT: And you are familiar with Iron Sky, right?

If you deactivate your account from the “Deactivate Account” section on the Account page, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service. However, if you want to reactivate at some point, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), and your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated if you decide to reactivate it. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service. 

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, please keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log in to your account and then submit your request by clicking here.

I didn’t realise this was possible. Thanks to Ray Schamp.

In honour of the release Transmit 4, give this post on the history of an app that almost became iTunes a read. It’s a fascinating look at the early history of Panic and the software music player explosion, and includes some uncommon insight into Steve Jobs and Apple to boot. It’s also a good reminder for developers who find themselves competing with game-changing products (emphasis mine):

It isn’t just that iTunes is free. It’s also damned impressive, and getting better by the day. Sure, it’s inflexible, and it could do more. But Apple has done things with iTunes that we would have never, ever been able to do with Audion — things we couldn’t even have imagined. The Music Store is nothing short of amazing. The iPod has changed music. (And Party Shuffle was really clever, I thought.) You see, Audion is not just going up against a free product that’s mediocre, leaving a lot of room for potential switchers (think Internet Explorer on Windows and the emergence of Firefox), but Audion is instead competing with a product that, you know, we actually use ourselves. When you double click the competition in the morning, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s time to hang up your hat!

Vastly improved speed, a whole new appearance, and the ability to mount connections as disks in the Finder. I’ve been beta testing it for some time now, and it’s well worth a download. At $19 for individuals with a Transmit 3 license, I’m convinced it’s more than worth the upgrade. For everyone else, it’s a slightly more heft (but very reasonable) $34.