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?

You all know long-time Flashforward friend Craig Swann — speaker, judge, festival winner — at some recent Flashforward conferences he had just time enough to present his session before jetting off to another engagement. But this time he’s not only sticking around Austin for most of the week, he’s throwing a party. And you’re invited! And it’s free!

FLUX.MXR (Texas Style)
Monday September 11, 2006, starting at 9 pm
@ The Jackalope, 404 E. 6th Street, Austin

Check out www.flux.to for all the details.

Have fun, but don’t sleep through the Adobe Keynote the next morning! Mike Downey promised something special…

We’ve made this point before, but in case you hadn’t yet realized, the Austin City Limits music festival will be taking place September 15-17, 2006 — coincidentally right after Flashforward Austin, which will be September 11-14.

In other words, after you spend four days basking in the company of like-minded digital artists, you can stay the weekend and bask in the company of like-minded music fans. That’s a full week of basking!

ACL announced their artist lineup a couple days ago and… seriously, if you don’t see a few of your favorite bands on that list, we don’t know you as well as we thought we did. (Or, more likely, those ARE your favorite bands and you just don’t know it yet.)

Tickets are still available for both Flashforward and Austin City Limits, so stick around for the concerts! How much work were you going to get done on Friday anyway?

Many of you have asked about these, and here they are at last: three iMixes full of music from Flashforward2006 Seattle.

AM playlist
Noon playlist
PM playlist

You’ll also want to check out the 2005 and 2004 iMixes, since any songs that appeared in one of those are not included in the 2006 versions.

Some quick FAQs:

What is a Flashforward iMix? We love music. During breaks, lunch and parties, we can’t stand having all that expensive audio equipment sit idle, so we play some of our favorite tunes. For several years now, Kevin Skoglund has compiled the playlists for those interludes, spending FAR longer than he probably should fine-tuning the placement of every song to match the time of day and the songs around it. No “shuffle” mode for us! The iMix is a way for us to share many of those songs with you — you can listen to previews until you find a few you like and/or remember.

Is the iMix an exact copy of what was played at the conference, in the same order? No. iTunes does not yet sell every song we like (maybe some day!) and even though we’ll often repeat our favorites from one show to the next, we try not to duplicate songs across iMixes. So each iMix is created from scratch using the conference playlists as its source.

Why three playlists for Seattle instead of one? Because we had so much more music to choose from this time! Unlike previous shows, at which the audio crew would pop in the designated mix disc for a particular break, this time we streamed a continuous mix to a computer in each of the session rooms. That way whenever a session broke, the music was already playing, and as you walked from room to room the music would continue more or less in sync with the room you just left. But this meant planning for FAR more music than usual, most of which was never heard!

So let us know: did you find the song you were looking for? Any requests for Austin?

All the music you hear before and between sessions at Flashforward is painstakingly hand-selected by Kevin Skoglund. He tweaks each playlist for a particular day and time, and always has at least three times as much queued up as we need, in case a break goes long…

If you’re curious about any of the songs you heard, or if you want to hear some of the music that never got played, he also put together an iMix of the subset of songs available on iTunes:

Flashforward 2005 iMix

Enjoy! Tell us which favorite song of yours you were surprised to hear at Flashforward, or which new group you discovered while waiting for a session to start…