mercurious

Academic Site Earns New Distinction

The professorial site’s URL identifier has been streamlined to an expressively concise:

»»» dave.parsons.edu

Update your bookmarks. Here you can see Ivan Sutherland busy updating his link to my site on the TK2.

LOCKDOWN

In a stunning sweep and a victory for Apple any way you slice it, an unnamed party has purchased the “iPhone DevTeam” Pwnage tool demonstrated on YouTube, widely announced for release today. The team has been disbanded and the jailbreak and unlock scene will probably never be the same again.

Surely the lawyers have locked this one down tight, and we’ll probably never know, but bets are on Apple using both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the almighty, irresistible dollar to squelch these hackers once and for all. Their tool seems to violate the reverse engineering and copyright circumventions intrinsic to the DMCA, by allowing the customization of the firmware and operating system files.

We hope the term “pwned” is retired now. We didn’t think someone could come up with a word worse than “blog” and then see it leak into the vernacular. Perhaps the Apple legal team is defending not only their intellectual property, but also the English language?

April Fools?

Her Majesty the Queen of Impressions Returns to the Boob Tube

Back in the glory days when the Simpsons first aired, I remember watching The Tracey Ullman Show afterwards, characterized by her zany characterizations that I was probably too young to fully appreciate. She’s back, but this time on premium cable, and last night premiered her new series State of the Union. She is at times hilarious, at other times utterly depressing for her spot-on renditions of the great contradiction that is the US of A. The premise behind the show is the cliché “day-in-the-life” snapshot, stitched together with a Google Earth inspired CGI intersitial and voice-over à la Idiocracy. The premiere’s highlights included the Bollywood Pharmacist, Tony Siricio as indy-flicker and of course, Princess Bloggini herself, Arianna Huffington. If you can tolerate the hit-or-miss bag of tricks intrinsic to impressions, and Anglophile humor, or just like comedic uses of makeup, give it a shot.

» Official Previews

Launches of iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR Foreshadow Possible Strategy

Steve Jobs “just says no” to Flash on iPhone. Well, on first glance, that’s just what he says now, and we all know, like a good episode of Lost, there’s always more to unpack and nothing is what it seems. Considering Adobe’s product line, the so-called “missing middle Flash product” suitable for the iPhone doesn’t yet exist. The middle product refers to something between Flash Player for the desktop and Flash Lite for mobile devices. But, considering the pipeline, it’s only a matter of time before Adobe AIR Mobile hits iPhone and just about every other mobile device, smack dab in the middle of the entire mainstream interactive media ecosystem.¹

Despite all the nay-saying, Adobe seems determined to get Flash on OS X Touch.

The brilliance of both Apple and Adobe waiting for Adobe AIR Mobile to launch is that it addresses all issues and pleases both parties politically:

• AIR Mobile is likely to be built upon AJAX, WebKit and Flash Player with the ActionScript 3.0 VM, as it is on the desktop, so it will be robust, efficient, modern and support both Apple’s and Adobe’s standards. It will please developers, designers, open standards proponents, lovers of proprietary goodness, and every other regular user who just wants everything to just work.
• AIR Mobile will solve the installation and distribution problem inherent in Flash Lite. Flash Player for the desktop has never been about standalone application installation. AIR on the desktop bridges this gap. It’s only a matter of time before Adobe sends AIR into the mobile device space and allows creators to put mobile app icons on standby screens with a few clicks. Just think Apple AppStore, or jailbreak AppTapp for Adobe Mobile AIR.
• AIR Mobile will bridge the fading distinction between web – desktop – mobile by allowing creators to write software in one environment (eg. Flex Builder) and distribute codebase to all three of these crucial platforms in a truly hybrid sense.
• It’s really no coincidence that Apple and Adobe are both investing heavily in products named “Air” — the notion of the data-cloud, cloud-sourcing, everyware, and webware is nascent. Narrow-minded jargon-lovers will call it Web 3.0, but intelligent folks will hopefully leave this lame version number moniker behind and use the appropriately visionary language espoused here.

Multi-touch API is the key

The central unresolved issue that remains is a multi-touch API. Any version of Flash for iPhone will need to have its intrinsic APIs updated for multi-touch and that will need to translate to a higher-level ActionScript object so that designers and developers can trap events related to multi-touch gestures. Without gestures like pinch, flick, zoom and others, it’s really pointless to put Flash on iPhone.

At the end of the day, talk about politics, performance and battery life are probably just the red-herrings that both Apple and Adobe need to work out the vexing issue of multi-touch APIs. In fact, it will probably take a few years before all platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and iPhone) all reckon with multi-touch on all levels of hardware and software.

The alleged YouTube Mobile Safari plugin in OS X Touch 2.0 beta is probably all the beehive needs to chill out and give Apple and Adobe the breathing room they need to get multi-touch worked out, and deploy Mobile AIR on a dizzying and divergent array of devices, platforms and crotchety carriers.

Previously:

• YouTube plugin for Mobile Safari Suggests No Flash in iPhone 2.0←
• Will iPhone Ever Run Flash?←

Footnotes

1. This is based only pure postulation and not informed by any confidential Adobe insight. [↩]

Specula-palooza Rocks On

The latest in Flash and iPhone rumor-mongering suggests a YouTube plug-in for Mobile Safari will accompany this summer’s Touch OS 2.0 update. An uncorroborated claim indicates that this plug-in is contained within the recently seeded developer iPhone SDK 2.0 beta firmware.

This would theoretically enable embedded YouTube movies to work on the billions of pages that currently flaunt the dreaded blue question mark icon. Presumably, a page with an embedded YouTube SWF player might show a thumbnail with a play icon that when tapped would load the clip in the native YouTube player or some embedded player within Mobile Safari. This would be similar to what happens when you load an embedded MP4 video file via the native QuickTime player within the iPod function.

In technical terms, Mobile Safari may parse the OBJECT and EMBED tags that point to the YouTube SWF player and redirect the path to the video into its own native player.

It’s important to note that not all YouTube videos would work. In fact, numerous clips not encoded to MP4 H.264 remain only available in the Flash codecs Sorenson Spark and On2 and therefore would not play in the Mobile Safari YouTube plugin. Although, Apple and Google seem to be colluding to convert the vast user-generated video library over into the H.263 format. It’s truly doubtful that OS X Touch 2.0 contains additional video codecs beyond H.263.

However, rather than subscribing to comment stream appearing below rumor sites, this YouTube Mobile Safari plugin is very likely not a clue towards a Flash player for iPhone. In fact, this could be the kiss of death for the chances of seeing it soon.

This kind of Mobile Safari plug-in access is precisely what Apple is shielding from Adobe (and other third-party developers, thanks to the sandbox intrinsic to the SDK). In many ways, a YouTube plugin acts as a trojan horse to usurp dominance from Flash in favor of WebKit and open standards. For most people who crave a Flash Player for iPhone, it’s the frequent dead-end to embedded YouTube clips that has them most irked. Once that kink is worked out, will users really miss Flash?

The other crucial importance of a Mobile Safari YouTube plugin is that it bypasses the main sticking point: how to implement multi-touch via an ActionScript API in the Flash Player!

We’re not suggesting Flash Player won’t ever appear on OS X Touch, but if a native YouTube plugin appears for Mobile Safari this summer, it has big implications for Adobe’s mobile strategy, and concerns the long-term viability of Flash as a de-facto standard if the mobile medium cannot be captured.

We’d love to see Flash on OS X Touch. There is a vast designer and developer community out there fluent in ActionScript that would thrive in a Touch world. It’s all about a multi-touch API from here on out. We’ve tinkered with both Mobile Safari web application design with WebKit and AJAX and also attempted to pick apart Cocoa Touch. There is no middle ground yet, and the Touch application market is nascent and fractured as a result. You’ve either got really crappy web applications or sketchy jailbreak apps. Yes, this summer’s launch of the AppStore will change the game forever. But, until the vast Adobe-enabled developer community is employed to create, the market will be constricted by limitations and learning curves.

Previously: Will iPhone Ever Run Flash? ←