Share/E-Mail

When Steve Jobs sat on stage using an iPad that clearly didn’t support Flash, the discussion of Flash and iPhone OS instantly shifted from “Will Apple ever allow Flash on iPhone OS?” to “What does it mean for Flash that Apple will never allow it on iPhone OS?” to, in some cases, “What does it mean for the Web that Flash is on its way out?“

Over the weekend, dogpile on the rabbit syndrome set in. Adobe employees blogged in defense of Flash, but if the software got a stirring defense from anyone else, I didn’t come across it. Even the thoughts from Flash supporters tended to be bleak.

If aggravating ads and Web sites with pointless “intros” drive you bonkers, don’t blame Flash–if and when HTML5 becomes pervasive, that stuff will all still exist in HTM5 form. On the other hand, if you dislike Flash because you find it buggy or sluggish–or because you don’t want to deal with plug-ins, period–HTML5’s support for video (and rich interactivity) could be the solution.

But not yet. HTML5 video is fabulous in principle, and if I were the type to bet on the outcome of technical wars, I’d place my money on it. So far, it’s an unratified, still-evolving would-be Web standard, not a done deal: Safari and Chrome support one video codec, Firefox supports another, and the still-dominant Internet Explorer doesn’t do HTML5 video at all yet.

One way or another, all this will work itself out. Adobe has ambitious plans to put Flash on a bevy of mobile platforms. The squabbling over implementation of HTML5 can’t go on forever, unless the goal is to render the standard irrelevant. Nearly all significant Flash-based content will make its way to the iPhone and iPad, via HTML5, native iPhone OS apps, and/or other means.

Me, I don’t look at any of this in philosophical terms. I just want the content I’m interested in to be available on all the devices I use, via technology that’s so reliable I forget it’s there. If Flash can do that, cool. But if it’s not available on the iPhone OS, it can’t. And if it’s competing against built-in HTML5 features that are available on all browsers, it’s hard to see how it can win–unless, as folks are suggesting, Adobe ditches the Flash Player and makes Flash into a tool for creating HTML content.

Let’s end this with a few tweets my Twitter pals sent in response to my question “What future do you wish for Flash?” And then a poll…

Share/E-Mail

Either way Adobe is not going to wait much longer. It’s Creative Suite 5 product, now going through private beta, is going to include functionality that will automatically convert Flash applications to ones that are compatible with the iPhone.

This has the potential to be quite the step forward in iPhone development. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld seems to even go as far as suggesting this as some kind of game changer. CS5 has the potential to expand the developer far beyond the 125,000 iPhone developers out there today, considering there’s about two million Flash developers worldwide.

I hate to rain on anyones parade, but not so fast.

For all that we know of this functionality, it appears to just be a port. Essentially the Flash code is translated into what the software believes is the closest match in iPhone code and goes with it. Like we’ve found out in the past with “WYSIWYG” HTML editors such as Microsoft’s popular FrontPage product, this isn’t always a good thing.

What’s the result? Bulky, slow running applications. In the dog-eat-dog world that has become the App Store, that’s just not going to fly.

I highly doubt that Flash developers that have gone to great lengths to create great Flash apps would allow these same apps to become subpar just to get on the iPhone. While no doubt there will be a subset of Flash developers that will use this feature, it’s not going to be as many as people think.

Bottom line? If these developers want to develop for the iPhone, then they should do it the right way.

Share/E-Mail

Windows Mobile: signs of life.

Unlimited wireless broadband for $39.

Verizon getting new Palm phones?

Is Apple censoring Chinese apps?

List: ten decade-defining gadgets.

________________________

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

Share/E-Mail

Um, hasn’t Seemsic run on Windows all along? Well, yes, but that’s because it’ s written in Adobe AIR, an application platform that lets programmers write Flash applications that can run outside the browser. (That’s a dumbed-down explanation of AIR, but enough to get the gist across, I hope.) One of the principal selling points of AIR is that it lets developers write one app that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, as Seesmic Desktop does.

In theory, the existence of an AIR version of Seesmic should eliminate the need for the company to bother with a Windows one. To date, though, AIR hasn’t been a miracle cure for incompatible operating systems. Some good stuff has been built with the technology–including Seesmic, archrival TweetDeck, and Times Reader–but AIR is notorious for hogging memory and computing cycles. And AIR apps’ user interfaces tend to feel a little foreign, too–there’s still something to be said for Windows apps that feel like Windows apps, and Mac ones that feel Maclike.

The state of AIR feels uncannily similar to the situation with Sun’s Java back in the 1990s. Java was also supposed to let programmers stop worrying about incompatible operating systems. Companies built ambitious products such as entire office suites in Java. But while Java did have a major impact on the world–among many other things, it’s the basis of RIM’s BlackBerry OS–it did little to reduce the need for native applications for Windows, OS X, and Linux. That was in part because it had a reputation for…hogging memory and computing cycles, and for producing apps that felt a little foreign.

Bottom line: Inside the browser, platform-independent technologies have flourished, including open standards such as JavaScript and proprietary ones such as Adobe’s Flash. Outside the browser, not so much. Come to think of it, I like Seesmic’s entirely Web-based app a lot more than the AIR version.

Oddly enough, there’s major AIR news today: Adobe has unveiled a beta of AIR 2, which is supposed to be less piggish and to permit more native-feeling programs. (It may or may not be a coincidence that Adobe announced the new version during Microsoft’s big conference–you be the judge.) I still like the idea of platforms like AIR, and am glad Adobe is continuing to plug away at at it. Unlike some people, I’m not an AIR hater. But come to think of it, I’ve tried a whole bunch of AIR apps over the past year, and usually abandon them pretty darn quickly.

For now, I understand completely why Seesmic decided to go native in Windows. Wonder how long it’ll be until there’s absolutely no reason to write an app for a particular OS?

Share/E-Mail

Satellite radio iPhone dock shipping.

Paramount movies on thumb drives.

Twitter lists in a widget.

Multitouch Droid? Not in America.

How DVRs could save TV.

Verizon to subsidize tiny Sony?

Nintendo: The Wii has “stalled.”

________________________

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

Share/E-Mail

This has nothing to do with Flash Player, and won’t let iPhone users view Flash content on the Web–it’s just a way for developers who are comfortable with Flash to build iPhone apps. It’ll presumably be useful when a company’s putting together an app in Flash for multiple devices, and wants to get it onto the iPhone without starting from scratch.

It sounds like a smart way for Adobe to jam its foot into the iPhone door even if Flash Player for the iPhone remains an iffy proposition–but if these tools are worth using, iPhone users should see no signs whatsoever that there’s anything unusual about the apps that developers build with them.

Share/E-Mail

ViewSonic: from displays to smartphones.

Unhappy laptop owners sue Nvidia.

Adobe helps media player builders.

A Moto G1 from T-Mobile?

Twitter: bigger than NYT, WSJ.

Help! My iPhone is overheating.

Intel’s laptop and netbook roadmap.

Why is Microsoft raising money?

Microsoft tweets about Zune phone?

Apple nixes religious humor app.

Sorry you got a Kindle?

Share/E-Mail

Larry Ellison is buying Sun.

Adobe puts Flash on TVs.

The post-Windows era begins.

TiVo to sell user data.

YouTube’s new comment filtering system.

Toshiba’s netbook starts at $600.

iPhone refurbs: a good deal.

Apple leads in customer experience.

A review of iPhone Quickoffice.

Microsoft gets $15 per netbook.

Share/E-Mail

For this story–which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose “Whatever Became of…?” books I loved as a kid–I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant–if “extant” means that they remain for sale, in one way or another–and didn’t address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

If you’re like me, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that some products are still with us at all–and will be saddened by the fates of others. Hey, they may all be inanimate objects, but they meant a lot to some of us back in the day.

Click on to continue–or, if you’re in a hurry, use the links below to skip ahead to a particular section.

Hardware Holdouts
More Hardware Holdouts
Software Survivors
Sites, Services, and Stores

Hardware Holdouts

Dot-Matrix Printers

What they were: The printer you probably owned if you had a PC in the home from the late 1970s until the early-to-mid-1990s. Models like the Epson FX-80 and Panasonic KX-P1124 were noisy and slow, and the best output they could muster was the optimistically-named “near letter quality.” But they were affordable, versatile, and built like tanks.

What happened: Beginning in the early 1990s, inkjet printers from HP, Epson, and Canon started to get pretty good–their output came far closer to rivaling that of a laser printer than dot-matrix ever could. And then, in the mid-1990s, they added something that killed the mass-market dot-matrix printer almost instantly: really good color. (I still remember having my socks knocked off by the original Epson Stylus Color when I saw it at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1994.) There was simply no comparison between even the best dot-matrix printer and a color inkjet.

Current whereabouts: Nobody ever thinks about dot-matrix printers anymore, but they haven’t gone away–my local Office Depot still stocks them, in fact. That’s because they have at least two valuable features that inkjet and laser models can’t match: The fact that the dot-matrix printhead hits the paper with a hard whack means they’re perfect for printing multiple-part forms, and their use of tractor-feed mechanisms rather than dinky trays lets them print thousands of pages without a paper refill. Consequently, small businesses everywhere refuse to give them up. It won’t startle me if there are still Epsons productively hammering out invoices and receipts a couple of decades from now, assuming we still use paper at all.

Hayes Modems

What they were: Dial-up modems from the company whose founder, Dennis Hayes, essentially invented the PC modem in the 1970s. The commands he devised became such a standard that all dial-up modems use them to this day. Hayes dominated the modem business for years–it was as synonymous with the product category it pioneered as any tech company before or since.

What happened: Well, dial-up modems don’t matter as much as they once did, in case you hadn’t noticed. But Hayes’ decline and fall dates to well before the death of dial-up: The company stubbornly kept prices high even in the face of much cheaper competition, and thought its future lay in making ISDN modems, a market that never took off. It declared bankruptcy in 1994 and again in 1998, and was liquidated in 1999.

Current whereabouts: In 1999, Zoom Telephonics–the company whose dirt-cheap modems played a major role in crushing Hayes–bought the Hayes name. It continues to market a few Hayes-branded modems. But it’s a pretty obscure fate for a once-mighty brand–I didn’t know it was still extant at all until I checked.

MiniDisc

What it was: Sony’s format for pint-sized recordable audio discs, introduced in 1992. The idea was that it combined the best qualities of compact discs and cassette tapes into one high-quality, portable package that could contain up to eighty minutes of music.

What happened: MiniDisc found some fans–it was popular in Asia, and among musicians. But it never gained much support from the music industry, so few prerecorded albums were available. And within a few years of its introduction, it found itself competing with digital downloads–and while Sony introduced NetMD, a MiniDisc variant that supported MP3, it made it remarkably unappealing by adding copy protection to your tracks as you transferred them to disc. Why would you choose NetMD when a multitude of players, such as those from Diamond and Creative, let MP3s be MP3s? Good question!

Current whereabouts: In 2004, Sony upgraded the MiniDisc format with Hi-MD, a higher-capacity, more flexible standard that was backwards compatible with MiniDiscs. It garnered some admiration among audiophiles for the high quality of its recording capabilities. But as of 2009, only one Hi-MD device remains in Sony’s lineup, the MZ-M200. It’s aimed at musicians and journalists who need to make recordings on the go. The moment it disappears, we can officially declare MiniDisc dead.

Monochrome Displays

What they were: The black-and-white CRT that most businesses and many homes used with computers from the 1970s through the late 1980s–and they worked just fine, since most DOS applications made little use of color, and early Macs didn’t support it at all.

What happened: Graphical user interfaces, multimedia, and games all made universal use of color inevitable, but it took a long time before it truly conquered computing. Well into the 1990s, lots of folks who wouldn’t dream of using a black-and-white display with a desktop PC still toted monochrome notebooks. But today, even a $200 netbook has a perfectly respectable color display.

Current whereabouts: You don’t want a monochrome display. But if you did, you wouldn’t have trouble finding one–even Dell still stocks them. They’re still out there in large quantities, being used for electronic cash registers and other unglamorous but important text-based applications. And hey, monochrome is making its own unexpected sort of comeback: My brand-new Kindle 2 e-book reader has an e-ink screen that does sixteen shades of gray, and nothing else.

Hercules

What it was: An extremely popular line of graphics cards for IBM PCs and compatibles. Hercules first appeared in 1982, the year after the IBM PC was launched, and was known for its high-quality text; it was as synonymous with graphics in the 1980s as Creative’s Sound Blaster was with audio a decade later.

What happened: When fancy color graphics replaced spartan text displays, Hercules continued to be a prominent brand for years, though it never dominated as it did in the early years. But in 1998, it was bought out by competitor ELSA, which then went bankrupt and sold the Hercules brand to French tech company Guillemot. (Researching this article, I’ve come to the conclusion that one sale or merger is usually bad news for a venerable brand, and a second one is usually near-fatal.) Guillemot continued to make cards under the Hercules name for several years. But industry consolidation in the graphics biz was ongoing and brutal, and in 2004 it ceased production of them.

Current whereabouts: The Hercules name lives on, but on an array of tech gadgets that doesn’t include graphics cards: Guillemot uses it for notebooks, Wi-Fi and powerline networking gear, sound cards, speakers, iPod accessories, laptop bags, and more. I wish them luck. But it’s a little as if McDonalds stopped selling burgers to concentrate on tuna salad, Philly cheese steaks, BLTs, and Reubens.

Share/E-Mail