How the iPad Is Already Reshaping the Internet (Sans Flash) 532
The Internet's already starting to look different, says Gizmodo, in a piece of interest not only to everyone with an iPad floating around the UPS system, but also those of us thinking about some other kind of tablet in the medium-term future. As they put it, "The iPad doesn't run Flash. If your website uses Flash, it won't play well on the iPad. Turns out, a lot of people want their sites to look pretty on the iPad."
And an anonymous reader adds this snippet from Webmonkey: "In anticipation of Saturday's release of the iPad — which doesn't run Flash — Apple has published a list of 'iPad Ready' websites. The sites are all big league sluggers like CNN, The New York Times, People Magazine and MLB.com. Surprisingly, there are also a few video-heavy sites in the mix (Vimeo, Flickr, and TED) which would traditionally rely on Flash Player for video playback."
Ummm.. (Score:1, Informative)
Flickr is not a video heavy site.
Re:Ummm.. (Score:2, Informative)
yeah. The only video site in the list is vimeo. The rest are news sites.
For the smart people, you can read all the other websites via RSS. I'm amazed that a site that would be just fine being read via RSS is touted as special for being "ipad ready".
Re:They are not... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I agree. The sale of 50,000 to 1,000,000 (initial) units is hardly enough to even make the internet blink, let alone take a dramatic turn away from a product that has been an internet changer for the past decade. Considering the lack of standard implementation of HTML 5 you won't see much impact for a long time to come. Flash has helped monetize the web and the investment is considerable. Nothing Apple will do will change that overnight, and attempts like this look shrill to the educated masses.
Any claim of an impact the iPad has (or will have for the next couple years) is an exaggeration.
Re:Apple is scared of write once run anywhere (Score:3, Informative)
You do realize the alternative to Flash they're proposing is HTML5 / h.264, right? Both open standards that anyone can use and write on any platform.
Re:Not everyone is an Apple whore (Score:2, Informative)
A fully-pimped out iPad is $1,000.00 (anyone who buys the base model is going to experience lunch-bag letdown within 6 months). And it still doesn't do what every other tablet on the market does.
Also, there are almost 50 competitors that have said they will have products on the market in time for this years' holiday season - that's 7-8 months from now. Wait. You'll be able to buy 2 for the price of one iPad. = and they'll have more features (better resolution, full OS, etc).
Re:Not everyone is an Apple whore (Score:4, Informative)
Every competitor to the upas expected apple to have a base price of $1000 with the pimped out models costing more. Acer who was going to release a device at $800 or so that was equivilant to the base Ipad model has since changed their minds. Since they are rushing to make meetoo products available they won't take the year needed to create the custom software required to make a touch based device useful. Instead they will ship keyboards and regular software and wonder what they are doing wrong.
Re:Not everyone is an Apple whore (Score:3, Informative)
A fully-pimped out iPad is $1,000.00 (anyone who buys the base model is going to experience lunch-bag letdown within 6 months).
I call bullshit! The top of the range model costs $829.99. http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad [apple.com]
Re:Not everyone is an Apple whore (Score:3, Informative)
they won't take the year needed to create the custom software required to make a touch based device useful
Except that with Windows 7, Microsoft has already released a very usable multitouch OS. I doesn't have the novelty factor of the iPhone OS, but it's got all the little gestures and whatnot. The spacing between buttons actually changes when you're using touch vs. when your using a mouse or a stylus. You can take a look at the touch support here. [msdn.com]
I've been using a tablet pc from motion computing for almost half a year now and it's great! The handwriting recognition is impressive, and once it's been trained for a while, is amazing. It can read my writing - I can't even do that. Admittedly its three times the price of an iPad, but it's actually usable. If I were to buy an iPad, it would just sit around being unused. I can read fine sunlight, so I can use it anywhere. It's a full computer, so I can install OneNote, or whatever I feel like. Oh, and I can write my own software for it.
Re:Apple is scared of write once run anywhere (Score:3, Informative)
If Apple is scared of write once, run anywhere, then when they released the iPhone they would have done what every other smart phone had done up until that point. They would have included a crappy web browser that barely did more than handle WAP sites. Instead, they made Safari on the iPhone as full functional at rendering pages as Safari on the desktop.
In fact, for the first year of its existence, if you wanted to build an iPhone app, the recommendation from Apple was to build it as a webpage that was formatted to follow the iPhone UI guidelines. That's the opposite of locking down the ecosystem as you accuse them of.