From:The Unofficial Apple Weblog
PCMag.com’s recent article The Best Apple Product Alternatives couldn’t smell any more like “bait” without being covered in worms.
Great piece of point by point debunking by TUAW. I love the title too!
(Read PCMag offers “best” alternatives to Apple products, redefines “best” in process.)
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.
(Read Why the iPad Web Demo Was Full of Holes – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.)
It seems obvious to me (and to many others) that flash’s days of prominence are over. More and more websites are using css and javascript with dhtml to produce the kind of sites that would have previously required flash. Coupled with the numerous video heavy sites that have begun to offer alternatives to Flash you can easily see that developers are starting to look in another direction. John Gruber has a very good piece on this too that’s worth checking out.
I think for all the moaning about the iPad not having flash, I think the bigger concern is what effect will the iPad have on Flash. If it’s even moderately successful (and it will be) then you’ll start to see Flash disappearing from web sites. Given how poorly flash often performs, and how good some of the alternatives now are, I don’t see that as a bad thing.
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.
The more confusing thing for me though was the moving of the stop, reload and status markers into the address field, which is a bit weird. I also miss the blue progress bar, and I hope Apple decide to bring that back for the final version, although there is a hidden preference you can use to get it back.
Performance wise the browser is definitely much snappier than its previous version. I had recently started using firefox as my main browser because of the infamous safari cookie issue, and I had been impressed by the page rendering speed in firefox. However, the recent security update has fixed the cookie issue (at long last) and combined with the new speed of safari 4 it’s good to be home as it were.
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.
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