thomas fitzgerald.net

The New York Times has a good piece on why the iPad doesn’t have flash

Numerous developers and executives that I interviewed for my story said there was a trend toward offering users an alternative to Flash video, the predominant video standard online, in the form of HTML5, an open standard.

Senior-level managers from many of the top video sites online, including YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and Flickr, all agreed that video online is starting to splinter, and as some test out HTML5 for video distribution, many will begin offering both formats as the iPad makes its way onto the market.

Check this out, this is really impressive. Parallax scrolling done entirely in CSS. Look ma, no flash.

When Apple came out with the Safari 4 beta during the week it was certainly a surprise. I don’t think anyone say it coming, and aside from a striking similarity to a certain other browser out there, it’s certainly a unique offering from Apple. The biggest change is of course the top tabs. When I first downloaded it and tried it out I almost didn’t notice them. I was actually looking for the option to turn tabs on, not realizing that they were already there. But once you do, it takes a bit of getting used to the new location. At first | didn’t like it, but once you get used to it, they’re fine. And if nothing else you get back a little bit of screen real-estate.

I’ve played around with iWeb several times since it first came out, but I never really gave it much thought, as it always seemed pretty limited for what I wanted it to do. Recently however I was having a conversation with a friend who showed me some of the things they were doing with it and I was pretty impressed. So I decided to give it a second chance and have a good, deep exploration of the software’s capabilities. I have to say, I was really impressed with what I found. But this is not a review, because there are plenty of those around the internet already, instead I’d like to discuss what I think iWeb could be, because iWeb has, in my opinion huge potential. There is nothing really like it on any platform from what I can see, yet it is limited, partly for the audience it is aimed at. But with maybe 10 percent more functionality, iWeb could be 100 percent more useful. With that in mind, rather than cannibalize the iLife suite, I think Apple could really shake the web design market up if they came out with a professional version of iWeb.