Soma Design

@Nick Thanks for chim­ing in, even if it’s to dis­agree with me. 🙂

I almost left out the Flash stuff due to its high­ly polar­ized nature, but it is a sig­nif­i­cant aspect one way or anoth­er. I do of course have an opin­ion on the mat­ter which is that I’d rather have web stan­dards than Flash. Apple’s self-inter­est here just hap­pens to reflect my opinion.

As for video, H.264 sup­ports the video ele­ment on Safari (desk­top & mobile) & Chrome, as well as Flash wher­ev­er it runs. That’s basi­cal­ly 100% mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion right there with one for­mat. A sec­ond for­mat for Firefox–Ogg Theora–gets you 100% of browsers that sup­port the video ele­ment as well. Two for­mats isn’t that mas­sive a deal, and you can drop Ogg if it is. With a lit­tle capa­bil­i­ty sniff­ing and 1 or 2 for­mats, you’re sit­ting pret­ty for video. Mark Pil­grim’s Video on the Web remains the defin­i­tive work on the topic.

Now, when you say “every­thing you can do with Flash can work on all plat­forms except the Apple mobile devices,” you betray your Win­dows usage. 🙂 Flash is absolute­ly hor­ri­ble once you leave the Win­dows world. Noth­ing turns on my Mac­Book Pro’s fans quick­er than watch­ing a Flash video. Flash’s “cross-plat­form” sup­port real­ly means “we sup­port Win­dows and sor­ta-kin­da work else­where.” And I hear it’s even worse on Linux. 

I think that Adobe should invest their efforts into HTM­L5-based rich media author­ing tools. Flash’s finan­cial upside for Adobe has always been in the author­ing tools. Why not allow Flash to export to can­vas and/or SVG? (Where the capa­bil­i­ties line up, of course.) They’re already aim­ing to export iPhone (and iPad, I guess) apps in CS5, so they’re not ide­o­log­i­cal­ly mar­ried to the Flash run­time. Doing so would give Flash CS5 some real bite as a write-once, run-every­where author­ing tool.

@Dan Total­ly right on “slid­er” areas — swip­ing is the nat­ur­al UI metaphor for those. My ques­tion is: how do we indi­cate to touch users that it’s a swipe-able area? Not to men­tion learn­ing how to imple­ment that func­tion­al­i­ty at a JS lev­el — fun times ahead!

Apple’s moves re: Flash are sort of MS-esque, but at the same time there’s a huge dif­fer­ence because what they’re doing is lock­ing out non-stan­dards rather than cre­at­ing their own pro­pri­etary things. Their moti­va­tions are of course far from altruistic–Flash is bad for their bot­tom line on mobile platforms–but it’s still a move that’s good for web standards.

@Ionuţ No need to be sor­ry for dis­agree­ing. Hav­ing opin­ions is wel­come, I cer­tain­ly do!

As for your first point, I did say “You might wish to inform me that the screen can just as eas­i­ly be used in land­scape, but my money’s on peo­ple using it in por­trait more often than not.” It does­n’t mat­ter what the pro­mo videos show, what mat­ters is how peo­ple choose to use it, and even that they have the choice. I’m bet­ting on por­trait, but it’s just a guess until the device is out in the wild.

As for your thoughts on Flash, you’re wel­come to them. I’m aware of all the rebut­tals you’ve made, and don’t much care. The main point I’m mak­ing is that Flash use is declin­ing and web stan­dards are increas­ing, which I think is great. I’m not say­ing that Flash will vanish—this isn’t an all-or-noth­ing propo­si­tion. And of course Adobe will make author­ing tools that sup­port can­vas (and SVG and CSS ani­ma­tions, I’m sure)—they’ve always made mon­ey from author­ing tools, not the Flash run­time itself.

@Stephen, I think you raise a good point (and that’s some good UX brain­storm­ing), but I agree with Dan that pinch/zoom isn’t where the rev­o­lu­tion nec­es­sar­i­ly is. The rev­o­lu­tion is in the sum, not the parts. Debat­ing between pinch/zoom and swipe already shows the big thing here: there are now a mul­ti­tude of ways to inter­act with con­tent, rather than only a mouse.

There’s pinch, swipe, rotate, and a whole host of mul­ti-touch (and mul­ti-hand) ges­tures that are only start­ing to be invent­ed. My imag­i­na­tion runs wild: smash­ing two objects (each grabbed with a a dif­fer­ent hand) togeth­er; using two hands to do com­bo pinch/zooms and pans to pan around Google Earth while con­trol­ling the entire 3D views­cape. A mouse only allows you to con­trol one plane at a time.

I think that the key thing here is to note the types of inter­ac­tions that are being built into the native apps. The iWork apps espe­cial­ly are doing some new things with mult-hand mul­ti-touch. After see­ing what types of inter­ac­tion take hold, we can hope­ful­ly begin to use some of them in touch-enabled websites.