ReadWriteWeb was the first major tech blog off the mark to get the story on Steve Job’s explanation of why he is excluding Flash on the iPlatforms. RWW nicely summarizes the Flash points and then rightly raises the issue of Google’s Android and its support of Flash. RWW asks is Androids more flexible approach to development going to help in its contest with Apple’s iPlatforms. But RWW does not consider the broader development issues which I have appended as a comment on the posting. Here are the relevant points from that comment:
2)Steve has also ruled out Java on the iPlatforms – but has supplied no explanation for that.
3)Steve has specifically excluded Flash’s Generator technology but has not clarified what it will do about many other tools that generate iPhone and iPad code.
4)Steve says go Objective C which is proprietary though like Microsoft’s .NET, there is an Open GNU implementation 2 versions behind.
5)Steve also says go HTML5 [and CSS3] but they a)are not yet completed standards; b)are really complex being the union of XML[see DOM and SVG ] and JavaScript [see canvas tag] into HTML and c)there are very few Web Development tools that support HTML5 – not the latest versions of Aptana, Dreamweaver, Eclipse, JetBrains, Komodo, NetBeans, Xara among others.
RWW certainly gets the importance of the remarks as recent PR has Apple and Steve Jobs doing a Bill Gates – sliding down the slippery slope from from innovation cult leader/powerhouse to iT/iMobile Monopoly Dictatorship.