A recent blog-meme is that Apple hates Flash. The iPhone and Apple TV don't support it yet; YouTube is re-encoding their videos in H.264 for both devices; Apple has been steadily enriching their own web presence with AJAX instead of Flash, and so on. The real conspiracy theorists came up with historical "evidence," from PostScript to Premiere, for why the two companies secretly hate one another.

In this light it's very interesting to note that today's big Apple release, My iTunes Widgets, is only available as a series of customizable, embedded SWFs. The same data is available as an RSS feed, so clearly any sort of app could make use of it, but Apple chose Flash to debut this feature. Hmm!

This follows the launch earlier this week, of the .Mac Web Galleries feature, one of which (Carousel) is also Flash-powered. (The rest are AJAX.)

Editorial by Christoph: This should make it embarrassingly obvious that Apple is not secretly working to eradicate Flash from the internet. Real web developers (who are not zealots or pundits) recognize that all the various "web 2.0" technologies can coexist, even on the same site, and each one has strengths and weaknesses that make it the right or wrong choice for different circumstances.

An optimist might see it as a reason to hope that Flash may eventually appear on a device like the iPhone. A dreamer (like me) might even think we'll eventually have AIR on that shiny little lump.

Here's to us dreamers!

PS: Can you tell I have a toddler?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 10:28 am and is filed under Culture, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.