Choosing Smarter

The real reason there's no Flash Player on the iPhone? (yet...)

 

We developed ChoiceBot widgets as Adobe Flash objects for a number of technical reasons that I won't go into. So far, this has definitely been a good decision since it's part of the reason why ChoiceBots perform well, contain all those helpful little effects and animations, and why it looks and runs the same on any browser on any operating system.

Except the iPhone. There's been a lot of speculation as to why Apple didn't include support for Flash in iPhone 2.0, since it's been one of the major gripes users have had since the day the original iPhone hit the market. Apple's official excuse has been that the Flash player is "too bloated" (i.e., uses too much memory and/or CPU power), but no-one seems to really believe that based on the device's powerful ARM processor and ample memory.

Maybe they just didn't have time to get it in there. That, I'm more inclined to believe.

I wonder, however, if the real reason isn't that Apple is worried about cannibalizing its App Store business. Most of the App Store apps that I've seen could have easily been developed in Flash, and a number of them were Flash applications before being ported to the iPhone. Once Flash is supported, the thousands of visually-rich applications in the App Store is going to be instantly dwarfed by the millions that have already been built in Flash, and that are freely available on the wild, wild Internet.

Apple's resistance to Flash starts to make sense when you consider that nearly all Flash applications are free, whereas many of the App Store apps aren't. And Apple gets 30% of every paid app that gets sold on the App Store. Hmmm...

Having access to ChoiceBots on a mobile device would be absolutely killer, because you could see your rankings, product pros and cons, etc. while you're in a store. I've personally experienced the need for this many times already. Let's hope Apple does the right thing and puts its users ahead of a cash grab that can't possibly last very long anyway.

UPDATE: Apple was just forced to pull a TV ad that claimed that the iPhone enables users to access "all of the Internet". People complained that Flash- and Java-enabled sites are a big part of the Internet, and that Apple's claim therefore constituted false advertising.

Criticizing the cloud

The #1 worry people talk about when using web-based apps is that they don’t work if you’re offline. No argument there, though platforms like Google Gears and Adobe Air are (slowly) starting to make that less of an issue. The rapid proliferation of WiFi hotspots and increasing affordability of 3G wireless data subscriptions will probably make being disconnected a thing of the past even before Gears or Air really catch on anyway. But yes, for now, if you’re out of range of an Ethernet jack, out of range of a WiFi hotspot and don’t have a 3G plan (or are in a long tunnel), you can’t organize your pics on Flickr or update your leads SalesForce.com.

The #2 complaint, however, makes less sense to me. People seem to loose sleep fretting over not being able to access their data if their web app provider goes offline. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen... when Twitter, Amazon S3 or Gmail go down for a few hours, it’s front-page news and the pundits rub their hands anxiously and list the perils of using an application that stores your critical data on someone else’s servers.

All of this fretting implies, however, that your data is always accessible when it’s on your local PC instead of being in the cloud. Ummm… <virtual hand raise> … When you install a new printer driver and it breaks the photo organizer software you’ve been running for the last year, you can’t access your data until you figure out what happened. When that game that your nephew downloaded from a Russian website that uses DOS fonts forces you to bring your PC into the shop to get cleaned up, you might not have access to your data for days. When (heaven forbid), the microscopic head in your hard drive gets one micron too close to the disk surface and you lose it all, you REALLY don’t have access to your data. IT departments inside of large companies spend their days running around helping users who can’t get at data on their local machines for one reason or another.

Sure the above are all infrequent events, but when you consider that most Web apps go down for less than a few hours a year (when you may or may not actually be even using them), well, if you’re going to lose sleep over something, worry about not being able to get at what’s on your hard drive (especially if you use a droppable, stealable laptop).

It has to be said, as well, that in all of the mini-catastrophes listed above, you’d be able to jump onto another computer and keep working if you were using a Web app.

Web apps are run by companies (like mine) that live and die by uptime. If our app goes down, you can bet that someone competent is working like an idiot to get it back up again. When your local word processor won’t launch for no apparent reason, no-one’s scrambling to fix it except you.

MyChoiceBot demo this evening

Sorry for the crazy-last-minute notice, but I'll be demoing MyChoiceBot at tonight's Ottawa Flexcamp event, hosted by Adobe. If you intend to attend, be sure to register. It's free, but filling up fast as I understand it.

To iPhone or not to iPhone

So I've finally decided that I need a smartphone. I had a Crackberry for a few years, but when I started working from home I was rarely away from a PC for more than an hour or two, so a full email device was overkill and I went back to a voice-centric phone (with surprisingly little twitching or cold sweats, by the by...).

Now that I'm starting to travel more, though, I'm back to needing something that can handle email gracefully, and whatever else I think would be cool/useful. Naturally, I fired up a ChoiceBot to churn through the ridiculous amount of product info that I came across within the first few minutes of research.

Some notes:

• Prices are all based on a 3-year contract from Rogers (a Canadian carrier), because they have me bound up like a stuffed pig. I threw in a couple of "iPhone killers" that are available in the US, though, just to see how they stack up.
• A few features that many people care about (like Bluetooth) aren't in here, because it's my ChoiceBot dammit, and I don't care about those features. Feel free to make a copy of this ChoiceBot in your very own free MyChoiceBot account, however (click the "Cool features" menu), which allows you to add or delete products and features to your heart's content.

I like to think that I'm not easily swayed by hype, and that I make purchase decisions based on utility alone (maybe that's why I came up with ChoiceBot...), so I set up features that were based on my needs, and not what the iPhone offered. Bottom line: According to my buying criteria anyway, the iPhone blows the others out of the water. Having access to almost any web page with an interface that actually makes getting around a large page on a small screen not-painful... that's golden baby.

I hate to admit it, but Steve Jobs knows what he's doing.