Samsung has released a ROM update for the CDMA Samsung Omnia 2 which addresses a call dropping issue:
The “Maintenance Release 1 (CK24) containing Qualcomm 1x/EVDO Call Drop Patch.” can only be installed via Windows XP and Vista and is available from Samsung here.
I know many people complained the last SMS hotfix for the HD2 did not fix all their problems. Hopefully this latest version, which is applicable to all devices with ROM 1.66 and below (which is just about any with with official software) will do better.
Update for HTC HD2 – New SMS Function Update
This update for HTC HD2 messaging lets you reach out to your friends and family with instant notifications. Keeping in touch has always been very important, and this update delivers just that: fast and reliable SMS messaging.
Installation Instructions:Note: This update is only applicable to ROM version is equal to 1.66.XXX.X, or lower.
I see the flowery tech writer has not been fired after all, but has just been on vacation.
Read more about the update and download it here.
Wade Roush wrote:
Starting today, developers of Twitter applications who list their apps at oneforty, the burgeoning Twitter app directory based in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood, can also sell their apps directly to oneforty visitors. That makes oneforty into the first true Twitter app store—a development that could help stimulate the growth of a substantial marketplace for applications related to real-time messaging, just as the iTunes App Store, the Android Marketplace, and other stores have created a huge new economy of mobile apps.
Along with its e-commerce launch, oneforty announced details of its recent $1.85 million Series A round, which closed just three days ago. Xconomy readers will be familiar with several of the investors on oneforty’s list, including Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners and Seattle-based tech entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack (an Xconomist).
It’s high time for a central marketplace for software that builds on Twitter, says Laura Fitton, oneforty’s founder and CEO. (San Francisco-based Twitter, in case you’ve been hiding in a cave since 2006, allows users to broadcast 140-character text messages to anyone who signs up to receive them; posting Twitter updates or “tweets” and watching others’ tweets roll in has become a constant preoccupation for millions of Internet users.) “There were really great Twitter apps, such as Smittter, that no one has heard of now because the developers couldn’t sustain them,” Fitton says. “They couldn’t make any money, because there was no marketplace or business model, so they withered on the vine.”
As a simple directory, launched last September, oneforty has already helped direct attention to Twitter apps that might otherwise have gone by the wayside. But as a store, Fitton predicts, it will help stimulate many more developers to create paid apps.
“The iTunes App Store proved that people would pay a buck or two for a mobile application. We are very interested to see how that will play out” in the area of real-time messaging, says Fitton, who is the co-author of Twitter for Dummies and is known to Twitter users as @pistachio. “Last December [2008], when I had the idea for oneforty, Twitterific was the only Twitter app I knew of that was for sale. Now there are almost 250 out there at some price point.”
On top of the news about its Twitter app marketplace, the five-employee company (which Bob profiled in two parts back in October) revealed full details of its recent fundraising activities for the first time. The company raised its seed funding, a $230,000 debt round provided by local angel investors, last June, barely two weeks after Fitton joined last summer’s inaugural Boston session of the Boulder, CO-based TechStars startup school. Fitton now says oneforty has augmented its seed funding with a $1.85 million Series A venture round that closed on January 11.
Flybridge put in $1.25 million, and general partner Jeff Bussgang has joined oneforty’s board of directors. (Bussgang has a blog post today at PE Hub on why he’s a “big believer” in the real-time Web.) The remaining $600,000 came from San Francisco-based Javelin Venture Partners and a group of individual investors. The angels include Dave McClure, a PayPal alum and prominent Silicon Valley startup advisor and blogger who runs the FF Angel seed-stage fund for San Francisco-based Founders Fund; Roger Ehrenberg, a former hedge fund manager for Deutsche Bank; Lee Hower, a principal at Point Judith Capital in Providence, RI; and Andy Sack, the co-leader of Seattle-based startup fund Founder’s Co-op, who was recently tapped to head TechStars’ first Seattle session.
Fitton calls the Series A funding a “pre-emptive” round—meaning the company could have gone on courting investors, but had already found the ones it wanted. “One question startups always wonder about is ‘How can you tell if a VC is interested?’ but in our case, it was clear from the beginning that Flybridge was sincere,” Fitton says. “We were intending to do this raise in March, and we thought, ‘Let’s take our time, and do a road show,’ but they just came in with such a great track record, some compelling and founder-friendly terms, and such a clear understanding of what we were looking to achieve, that it was a great match.”
On the angel side, Fitton says she’s especially excited to have the chance to work with Sack, who was oneforty’s TechStars mentor last summer, and McClure. “Having Dave McClure join is just phenomenal—he has been so …Next Page »
Ryan McBride wrote:
Wall Street is no stranger to computer models, which have been used for more than a decade by fund managers and traders to beat the market. But many of the models developed by the so-called “quants” have proved insufficiently prescient—they didn’t do a very good job, for example, of predicting the subprime mortgage crisis. Using computer modeling software initially developed to help pharmaceutical firms find biological targets for new drugs, Cambridge, MA-based Fina Technologies is hoping to recharge the troubled financial sector.
Fina has licensed its so-called “reverse engineering/forward simulation” (REFS) technology from Cambridge’s Gene Network Sciences, which has been developing and applying REFS for drug companies for several years. Under the REFS approach, software analyzes massive amounts of historical data to divine causal links, then makes forward projections based on the connections it’s discovered.
Fina boosted its prospects last month by closing a $4.5 million first-round financing from a pool of investors led by Reed Elsevier Ventures, the venture arm of the media and publishing conglomerate Reed Elsevier. Josh Holden, the CEO of Fina (and an early angel investor in Gene Network Sciences), talked to me recently about how the startup plans to use the cash to fund efforts to promote the REFS technology in the financial world.
Investment computer models—which are basically algorithms based on investment hypotheses—have had varied success. Holden, an MIT-trained engineer with more than a decade of experience in the investment world at Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions, says that a chronic problem is trying to jam too many variables or parameters into these algorithms. Fina aims to overcome this over-modeling problem with the REFS platform, which has shown that it can handle the massive amounts of data about biochemical signaling pathways in the human body needed to make predictions about how various drug candidates will affect the system.
“What we’re trying to do, at the most fundamental [level], is to automate the scientific method,” Holden says, “which is basically to propose a hypothesis, test whether that hypothesis is true in the presence of experimental data, [and] compare it to other hypotheses out there all with an eye toward controlling for over-fitting and complexity.”
The firm’s technology integrates input from multiple models before making predictions about the market, Holden explains, rather than using one algorithm overloaded with parameters. The upshot is that traders at hedge funds could predict changes in the market 5 minutes to 30 minutes before they happen, then buy or sell ahead of time to capitalize on the upward or downward shift in price, he says.
The startup has built sample models with the platform that make Holden confident that the technology makes the correct predictions about 55 to …Next Page »
Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:
[Updated 1/14/2010, 9:37 am. See Below] Darrius Thompson tells me he’s been involved for a long time in the software community, and he sees how consumer acceptance can be fluky. Some new software products get widespread distribution, and some go nowhere. Thompson says he believes in open-source products, but sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter if the software is available for free or not.
The runaway hit-or-miss nature of software development reminds him of the music industry. “Some of these guys were just taking in enough money to pay their server bill,” he says.
But Thompson tells me he’s also noticed that consumer acceptance tends to be much higher when users are offered a free software download at just the right moment. For example, during the years he worked at San Diego-based DivX (NASDAQ: DIVX), which provides audio-video compression technology, users would often readily agree to download software for a “surround sound” system if it was offered while they already were installing the DivX codec. Figuratively speaking, it’s like offering a free download of peanut butter while you’re installing jelly.
It was that realization that led Thompson and Chester Ng to found OpenCandy in 2007 with a handful of other ex-DivXers. The San Diego startup operates a Web-based network that allows a software publisher to advertise its product—and to offer it as optional download—while another program is being installed on a user’s computer. Both are usually offered as free downloads.
[Updates to clarify that OpenCandy’s system selects the software offer] OpenCandy helps facilitate the process by providing software publishers what it calls “a tiny plug-in” they can integrate into their installer, which enables publishers to recommend complementary software or services that might be valuable to their users. “Software developers are doing their best to make their advertising as targeted as possible,” Thompson explains. The publisher picks the products they want to recommend and our network automatically chooses the best offer for each consumer. For example, through OpenCandy’s partnership with San Francisco-based Nitro PDF Software, a user who downloads PrimoPDF, a popular free alternative to Adobe Acrobat, gets an offer to also install Snagit, a free program for capturing, sharing, and editing anything users see on their computer screen.
While it’s possible to do tricky things to get users to install software, Thompson says OpenCandy’s business model calls for recommending good software and ensuring that consumers opt into the download. “We really like the idea of openness. That’s the way we operate internally. We really believe in transparency, and in open systems in general,” Thompson says. The founders conveyed that sentiment when they named …Next Page »
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Most of us are never more than a metre away from our phones, which makes forgetting it at home even more disastrous. I Left My Phone At Home is insurance just for that day.
I Left My Phone At Home is an application that runs on your Windows® Mobile phone that lets you see and respond to your missed phone calls and text messages when you are away from your phone.
The application lets you:
The innovative software is just $4.99 and available from Marketplace here.
If you are still upset with HTC for not providing a Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade for the HTC Touch HD here’s a chance to dabble with the dark side easily.
Android 2.0.1 was recently hacked to work on the HTC Touch HD and now we have a English video to go with it. The video shows Android working pretty well with the HD even thought there are still some bugs and connectivity issues like no Wifi or Bluetooth. There are also speed problems, as you can tell from the video, the builds have extreme lag problems that should be fixed soon. This is still a test build, and soon enough there should be a new one that has better integration and other things to better the performance.
The system uses haret, meaning there is no flashing involved, and your system gets restored back to Windows Mobile on soft reset.
Via:MobileOSNews
Thanks Ngocluu for the tip.
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Rob Glaser, the founder and chief executive of Seattle-based RealNetworks, has stepped down, according to a company statement. Glaser will remain chairman of the board.
“After nearly 16 years, I’ve decided it’s time for me to step away from day-to-day operations,” Glaser said in a statement. “I’m grateful to all of our stakeholders—customers, partners, shareholders, and most of all, employees—for the support and commitment they’ve given to RealNetworks. I remain committed to the company and look forward to continuing to serve in my capacity as board chairman.” (See Glaser’s farewell note to Real’s employees here, from the Seattle Times.)
Real’s board of directors appointed Robert Kimball as president and acting CEO, and new board member. Kimball joined RealNetworks in 1999 and was most recently the company’s general counsel and executive vice president of corporate development. Glaser said a formal search process for a permanent CEO will begin soon.
The move seems to be part of a broader shakeup of the senior leadership team at Real (NASDAQ: RNWK). Yesterday, the company reported in an SEC filing that chief operating officer John Giamatteo will resign as of April 2. Giamatteo was also president of the company’s technology products and services division. The news was reported by PaidContent, TechFlash, and other outlets.
In November, RealNetworks laid off 4 percent of its worldwide staff (about 70 employees) as a result of the economic recession and cost-cutting measures. The company reported a small profit for the third quarter of last year, its first profitable quarter since the beginning of 2008.
Threaded email has become the new things in the newest WM 6.5.3 builds and we have a video demo here. The video demos the new way that MS lets you view your emails and it is pretty cool. If you can see the process of putting the emails under one name allows it to be more organized and easier to find something you are looking for. If you are interested, the newest builds with 23518.
Via:MobileOSNews
Get the ROM from the Video here , all I got to say is “bravo” to the ROM maker.
Now we have run into a few sceptics in our comment section, and of course more widely on the internet. We decided therefore to tabulate the evidence we have for Windows Mobile 7 being announced at Mobile World Congress, and of course coming to the HTC HD2.
Evidence for Windows Mobile 7 announcement at Mobile World Congress, release at the end of the year
As of October 2009 Windows Mobile 7 was on track.
ZDNet leaked a Maldives test program for Windows Mobile 7 for Q1 2010, for shipping in Q3 2010.
Windows Mobile 7 is in testing. You don’t test an OS a year before release.
A reliable XDA-Dev tipster said the OS would come in Q3 2010.
Digitimes leaked a Q4 timescale for WM7.
Phil Moore from Microsoft says in December Windows Mobile 7 is coming late next year.
LG says they will ship Windows Mobile 7 handsets in 2010. If the handsets are set to ship at the end of the year, the OS needs to e announced soon, and MWC has been the traditional location for this for Microsoft. Where else if not there?
Robbie Bach said they would discuss a product that’s not evolutionary, but looks, feels and acts completely different at Mobile World Congress. Whatever Windows Mobile 6.5.3 is, it is certainly evolutionary.
Office Vice President Kurt Delbene confirmed that Microsoft will be unveiling its plans for Windows Mobile 7 at the MIX 2010 conference in March 2010. This is after Mobile World Congress.
Evidence for WM7 on the HTC HD2
The HTC HD2 matches the Chassis 1 specs for Windows Mobile 7.
The HTC HD2’s Snapdragon processor supports Windows Mobile 7
Besides the previous leaks about Chassis 1, we have confirmation from leaked CV’s that Qualcomm was working on supporting Windows Mobile 7 on their Snapdragon processor.
Greg Sullivan spoke of the platform work – the only mobile OS we know of with specific hardware requirements is Windows Mobile 7.
HTC HD2’’s HTC Sense UI contains Windows Mobile 7 references.
HTC confirmed an upgrade via Twitter. Despite retracting it again, the initial confirmation appeared much more truthful than the much later retraction.
HTC Support staff confirming the HTC HD2 getting a free upgrade.
While the comment that support staff often know nothing is usually pretty accurate, HTC is still a small company, and the claim of a November or later free upgrade very specific.
Now after 2 hours of sifting through our Windows Mobile 7 coverage I am quite convinced. Are you? Let us know in the poll below.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Things are really heating up for Visible Technologies. The Bellevue, WA-based maker of software to help companies monitor social media and manage their online reputations announced today it has raised a Series C funding round worth $22 million. The round was led by a new investor—Investor Growth Capital (IGC), the growth-stage venture arm of Investor AB. Existing investors Ignition Partners, Centurion Holdings, In-Q-Tel, and WPP also participated.
“This funding allows us to accelerate our growth path to continue meeting the demands of global customers and help them drive real business results through successful online consumer engagement,” said Visible CEO Dan Vetras in a statement. “We chose IGC as our partners to lead the round for their market expertise, track record in creating sector-leading companies and ability to help us expand in markets outside North America, especially in Europe.”
Visible Technologies was founded back in 2003, and its cutting-edge technology finds positive and negative content about a brand online, for example, and uses keyword placement, optimization, and linking techniques to make the positive entries pop up higher in search-engine results. In the past year, the company has raised smaller amounts of equity and debt financing—it had raised a total of $23.5 million as of October 2009. Its customers include Microsoft, Autodesk, and Xerox.
Pocketnow has published another comparison between browsing speed on the HTC HD2 and the Google Nexus One, this time using Skyfire on the HD2.
In contrast to the last video, on this occasion Skyfire is much faster at presenting the web page on the Windows Mobile handset compared to the Android version.
Is this a reasonable comparison? Let us know below.
Before Opera Mobile 9.5 Access’s Netfront browser was a real competitor in the then anaemic Windows Mobile browser arena. Unfortunately the browser did not keep up with the times on Windows Mobile, and their latest 3.5 version has not won many over.
It seems Access is now set to bring their latest version Netfront 4.0, which has been seen on the PSP previously, over to Windows Mobile. The software features 20 times faster Javascript performance, smoother page scrolling, animated zooming and panning and other improved browsing features.
Access is set to release the software soon as part of their never-ending beta program (a bit like Opera I guess) and the version released should last for 6 months,
Keep an eye on Access’s website here for the appearance of the software.
Via Phonescoop.com
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Seattle-based Big Fish Games, a developer, publisher, and distributor of casual video games, has expanded its existing strategic partnership with San Francisco-based PlayFirst. As of today, Big Fish will provide e-commerce and customer support services for PlayFirst’s game distribution portal, while PlayFirst gets access to Big Fish’s catalog of games. Financial terms weren’t given, but it is a multi-year deal. Big Fish Games was founded in 2002. It raised $83.3 million in 2008 and made a couple of senior leadership hires last fall.
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Whether you’re a startup founder, Fortune 500 executive, or average Joe on the street, everyone is wondering what 2010 will look like for jobs and compensation. Indications so far are not good. Unemployment rates are sky-high. Salary freezes are still rampant. At the same time, nobody can seem to agree on how to pay executives what they’re really worth. ($23 billion in bonuses to Goldman Sachs employees?)
I took the opportunity to talk about some of these issues with the leadership at PayScale, a Seattle company that provides real-time compensation data to employers and employees, through what it calls “the world’s largest database of individual compensation profiles.” From where he sits, PayScale CEO Mike Metzger has an intriguing view of current trends in “human capital,” which I loosely define to include the talent flow, skill sets, experience, and compensation levels associated with creating economic value.
PayScale also announced a new board member today. She is Robin Ferracone, the CEO of RAF Capital, executive chair of Farient Advisors, and an expert in human resources with more than 25 years of consulting experience. Ferracone, who’s based in the Los Angeles area, has made a modest but undisclosed investment in PayScale, according to the company. (Metzger and Ferracone first met through another board member, Patricia Nakache from Trinity Ventures.)
“It’s a very interesting business,” Ferracone says. “When you get pay data directly from the consumers, you then get information about the individual. What PayScale does is it’s able to fill in the gaps about jobs that don’t get picked up by surveys.” That includes things like salaries across different offices and geographic regions for a given company, say—all updated continuously instead of once or twice a year.
PayScale was founded in 2002 and has been backed by Fluke Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Trinity Ventures, and others. A year ago, the company raised a $2 million Series C funding round. Metzger says PayScale’s staff now numbers in the “high 40s,” and that the company is not yet profitable, but is “driving hard” for profitability in 2010. He adds that it is coming off its best year and best quarter ever, in terms of revenue.
Here are the top three trends that Metzger and Ferracone are seeing in human capital as we head into 2010. (Metzger prefaced his comments with the caveat that PayScale sells its aggregated data mainly to small and medium-size businesses, so his view is biased towards those customers, versus Fortune 1000 companies.)
1. 2010 will not revert “back to normal.”
A lot of organizations in 2009 froze their compensation adjustments, says Metzger. “Flat was the new up. One of the themes we’re starting to hear now is that in 2010, things will not go back to normal.” That means companies are “beginning to sharpen the lens they’re using relative to the cost of human capital” and “taking a conservative posture in when they’ll make adjustments.”
The days of across-the-board pay increases plus merit bonuses seem to be gone for good. Overall, Metzger calls the situation “a little bit of a reset in terms of comp adjustment strategy.” And Ferracone adds, “We’re seeing [companies] not trying to make up for lost time, on the salary front.”
2. Talent is still in high demand in certain fields.
It’s not like nobody’s hiring. “There continue to be sectors and geographies where there are high demands for talent—IT in the Bay Area, nursing everywhere, and accounting in major metro …Next Page »
Mac OS X offers a computing experience that, according to many, is still unparalleled by its competitors. Built on a rock solid UNIX foundation and continually adding refinements that make interaction easier, OS X has a lot of powerful functionality that many users were unaware existed. One of these is the idea of “Smart Folders” and with a little primer, you can begin using them to make your Mac experience easier (and faster).
The idea of these Smart Folders are not unique to OS X. In fact, the idea started originally in the mid ‘90s with the now defunct BeOS. When Dominic Giampaolo, a software developer for Be, began working for Apple in 2002, some of the best elements of the BeOS made their way into Apple’s modern operating system. We know these features as “Smart Folders” and Spotlight, both of which launched in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, two years after Giampaolo began working for Apple.
A “Smart Folder” (or “Search Folder” as Windows Vista calls them when Microsoft introduced its version in 2006) is based on the idea that this folder is basically a “virtual folder” of its actual contents. This virtual folder doesn’t physically store copies of its contents inside but rather utilizes a database to store attributes about the files (defined either by the system or the user). This offers several advantages: they have a small file size, the ability for on-the-fly fine tuning of the criteria used to define the content as well as allowing the content to dynamically update as new files meet the criteria. Whoa. What does all of that mean? We’re getting there.
Smart Folders Save TimeIn short, Smart Folders save you time. You basically give them a list of rules to follow and they automatically fill themselves with content based on the criteria you’ve defined. It’s important though, to realize that these Smart Folders do not actually represent copies of the content, but merely virtually link to them. If you delete a file out of a Smart Folder, you’ve also deleted it from its original location.
Making a Smart Folder is quite easy. In fact, if you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, several of them have already been created. You might recognize them due to their trademark purple folder icon (also used to serve the same role in other applications, but we’ll discuss that in future articles). In the left side of a default Finder window, you’ll see an area called “Search For” with entries for “Today,” “Yesterday,” “Past Week” and some more. These are built in smart folders that automatically search your entire system for files meeting those criteria. But we can do far more powerful things with Smart Folders if we make our own.
Again, the beauty and power of Smart Folders comes from the fact that once you’ve defined the rules, this folder will automatically continue to update as new files are created or saved that meet its criteria.
Smart Folders sound great and once you’ve set one up, you’ll see the process is pretty simple. It’s also pretty powerful but, for inspiration, here’s a few examples of interesting and useful Smart Folders that you could create on your system.
Recent Documents: To view all your recent documents, set the kind to document and the last opened date to within the last 3 days.
Important Files: If you use Finder labels, select “Other” and choose “File label.” Then pick the file label that matches your desired results.
By Device: Have several cameras? You can use “Device make” and “Device model” to specify a particular camera (as well as any other EXIF data).
Do you use Smart Folders? Have any tips you’d like to share or comments on this post? Let me know what you think; I’d love to hear your feedback.
Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:
Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE), the Carlsbad, CA-based provider of biomedical diagnostic equipment and laboratory supplies, has agreed to acquire AcroMetrix, a diagnostics controls specialist based in the Bay Area community of Benicia, CA. Financial terms of the deal were not disculosed. Life says in a statement that AcroMetrix’ diagnostic quality control products allow a laboratory to achieve better standardization across systems and are more economically efficient to use than “homebrew” control reagents.
An interesting article at the financial blog 24/7 Wall St. today estimates the total cost of pirated apps to the App Store, for both Apple and developers, to be somewhere near the $450 million-mark. That number depends on a revenue estimate of between $60 million and $110 million per quarter, which is probably less than the actual number since those figures are based on a slightly older report by Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi.
The article also notes that finding good solid numbers related to both the number of jailbroken iPhones that are out there, and the number of those devices that are actually pirating games is difficult to do. After reviewing numerous sources of information, 24/ Wall St. arrived at the conclusion that an estimate of 75 percent piracy rates for paid apps was most accurate.
That means that for every paid app download, there have been three pirated downloads of the same app that result in no revenue. Given that the researchers behind the report also estimated that around 17 percent of the 3 billion app store downloads, or 510 million, were paid apps (though we found 1 in 4 in December, so that number seems to be growing), that means that the number of pirated apps is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.53 billion apps. Not a number you’ll see Apple using in its promotional material anytime soon.
Even considering that only around 10 percent of those who pirated apps would’ve purchased them instead if the illicit option was not available, this represents a loss of around $459 million for both Apple and the app developers working with the Mac maker. Doesn’t seem like an insignificant number.
Insignificant or not, Apple isn’t doing much to quell piracy rates, either. Sure, it counters the most recent jailbreak exploit every time a new model of the iPhone is released, but those countermeasures are usually pretty easily overcome. Apple could do more on the software side, with apps themselves, but that would only spark another arms race-type situation between the company and the hacking community, and allowing users to jailbreak and pirate frankly helps Apple sell hardware, which is the real cash cow.
It’s a troubling report for developers who can’t afford to just eat these kinds of losses the way Apple can. But it also makes the assumption that piracy will continue to grow, which I think is a false one. Yes, it’s easier than ever to jailbreak your iPhone, but as Apple continues to work on the operating system behind the platform, there is less and less reason to do so.
Many users only jailbreak to get some extra functionality out of their device that already exists there, rather than being set on trying to get software for free. As long as iPhone 4.0 introduces true multitasking, I think we’ll see overall jailbreak rates fall off considerably, and likely piracy numbers will follow, too.
When Flash appeared near the end of the last millennium it promised a bright new world of rich multimedia content creation and delivery via what would otherwise be drab old web pages. At a time when Geocities was the best the Web had to offer, Flash was a tempting — and not to mention dazzling — new kid on the block.
Over the years, as web technologies evolved and matured, Flash proved to be problematic; for those who make websites (and care about accessibility and web standards in a way ordinary people just don’t) it has gradually aged into an unwieldy, outmoded platform.
Even for those enjoying the most remarkable fruits of early Flash labor — for instance, YouTube relied on the technology heavily in its formative years — Flash was simultaneously the bringer of video entertainment and the most common reason for all browser (and a great many System) crashes. Also — did I mention the security vulnerabilities?
I hoped (foolishly, it seems) that it was only the big movie studios who, paranoid we’re all stealing their stuff, were still insisting on Flash-based content delivery, but according to Erick Schonfeld over on TechCrunch, there’s a whopping two million Flash developers out there, and they’re simply dying to bring their Flash-authored wares to the last platform on Earth that has, so far, remained blissfully Flash free — your iPhone.
The iPhone has always been marketed as a breakthrough Internet device, in spite of two limitations considered by some people to be significant — the iPhone’s browser, Mobile Safari, has never supported Java or Flash.
While the absence of Java is no big deal (honestly, is there anything more horrid than Java web plugins?) the lack of Flash support on the iPhone was considered debilitating enough that, in the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld viewer complaints and banned one of Apple’s iPhone commercials for ‘misleading’ customers with the line “All the parts of the Internet are on the iPhone.” It sounds rather like an over-reaction, but consider that in his 2008 WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs proudly announced, “Mobile browsing has gone from nothing to 98 percent with iPhone.” With so much mobile browsing going on, it seems any limitations matter profoundly. So, after almost three years browsing the web on our iPhones, how has the lack of Flash truly affected us?
Here’s the answer to that in three succinct syllables; not at all.
Seriously, has it so greatly inconvenienced anyone that they were driven away from the iPhone forever? (That rhetorical question will be read by our resident comment trolls as an open invitation to loudly proclaim their Android-based phones ‘superior’ because they do support Flash.)
Schonfeld offers an ominous prediction for 2010.
Adobe is going to bring its 2 million Flash developers to the iPhone, with or without Apple’s blessing. As it announced in October, the next version of its Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 […] will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate.
While Schonfeld thinks Apple’s lack of Flash support represents a “gaping hole in iPhone’s arsenal” I rather think the opposite is true. For all the iPhone’s inimitable prowess as a mobile computer, it’s not supposed to replace a laptop or desktop-class machine. What the iPhone brought to mobile phones (both in terms of functions and ease-of-use) was revolutionary in ways we readily take for granted today. But just think again of that figure; 98 percent browsing? That had never happened on mobile phones before, and it happened despite the lack of Flash.
Steve Jobs announces 98 percent of iPhone owners are using it for web browsing
But while I (perhaps incorrectly) assumed the lack of Flash was a usability consideration on Apple’s part, Schonfeld thinks the decision was motivated by a less obvious, and far more cunning, desire.
[Apple] wanted a chance to become ingrained with developers. Apple had to hold off Flash not so to control the video experience on the iPhone, but because it needed to establish its own Apple-controlled iPhone SDK. The last thing it needed was a competing developer platform getting in the way.
But Adobe Creative Suite 5 will provide precisely the magic button developers need to port their Flash apps to the iPhone.
…those 2 million developers will be able to keep working with Adobe tools and simply turn them into iPhone apps automatically. …if you thought there were a lot of iPhone apps now, just wait until the Flash floodgates are open.
This, frankly, scares me. I’ve rarely seen a flash site that I enjoyed. Even those which I thought impressive at first-blush rapidly became cumbersome and slow. And don’t get me started on the platform’s propensity for random crashing. If developers are granted the freedom to assault the stable, clean and comfortable world of my iPhone with gaudy, pointlessly-animated applications with inconsistent, ill-conceived UI’s, I can only hope there’s a quick and easy way to identify them in the App Store so I can avoid buying them altogether!
Schonfeld thinks CS5 will result in an avalanche of Flash-authored iPhone apps; I hope he’s wrong. Even on the desktop, Flash is something I prefer to avoid when I can. (I use three browsers — all of them employ a flash blocker — and as a result I feel my experience of the web improved markedly.) I honestly thought that, as 2010 gets under way, we’d all come to the same conclusion; that Flash is an antiquated technology whose security vulnerabilities and performance issues make it deeply undesirable.
If Apple can block these flash-authored apps, would it? Should it? Tell me how wrong I am, and why I’d better embrace it, in the comments below.
Quite a few people, especially those outside of USA, are not too happy with Marketplace for Windows Mobile. The service has obvious flaws which Microsoft has been slow to patch, such as few applications, small regional markets, and cost of listing applications.
In a recent thread at XDA-Developers a new Marketplace is brewing, designed for the freeware apps, themes and hacks with which XDA-Developers the teeming, but which can be quite difficult to find.
The suggestion appears to have caught the imagination of the users there, and a website appears already to be under development.
Follow the thread here for the latest.
Would you load up an XDA-Developers Marketplace on your phone? Let us know below.
Thanks Anders for the tip.
