Since I’ve been distracted a bit with matters of the physical world I didn’t have time to watch this, but of course in the open war on Apple vs. Flash a reply from one CEO to the ponderings of another CEO couldn’t take long. Yeah, just like his counterpart, he is right on some things, but not so right on others, but at least the more insights you gain on how such corp heads think, the more you understand the underlying matters of protecting specific business models and selling them as a "vision" to the rest of the world.

In other news, I saw the movie that lends this post its title. Having read some quite devastating reviews I was quite reluctant, but well, the things we do for love… My greatest fears were confirmed and it is really a shitty movie. Sam Worthington is hopelessly miscast as the main hero, the camera work is poor, the acting is cheesy, the story inconclusive and there is almost no 3D that would justify the higher ticket price. Even the use of GenArts’ Sapphire is so obvious and excessive, it hurts the eye. Definitely stay away from this movie.

*Star Trek – The Next Generation, season 5, episode 18

Like in that episode, it seems that in matters of Flash vs. Apple‘s vision of a "clean", standards conform Internet we are just as much stuck in a temporal loop as the crew of the Enterprise. Looks like time travel has finally been invented and you can have a Déjà-Vu every day if you so desire. Regardless of everybody already having thrown his views out there and a bunch of corporate types having made themselves look like utter dorks just the same, a certain Mr. Jobs, who runs another quite big garage company, couldn’t resist the temptation, so sit back, relax and enjoy the show. He’s of course right on some accounts, but then wrong on just as many others. Particularly disappointing is how he takes a claim to what he calls open standards, when in fact e.g. H.264 is just as proprietary as Flash video, was developed by a conglomerate of commercial companies and to this days has therefore licensing fees attached. It just happened to be available and quite coincidentally fit into their plans for world conquest. Generally this talk about "proprietary" or not coming from Apple always leaves a bad taste – come to think of it, most of what they do is built around a closed business model. Not that I mind – it’s their show and they decide who they let in their circus, but perhaps someone should remind them that when it comes to their own interests, they are quite defensive and actually pro-actively shut out people. This even directly relates to this Flash discussion, as only a short while ago they released libraries that allow third-party programmers to exploit certain hardware acceleration functions for decoding video, meaning that no matter how much resources Adobe had thrown into this, they would never have been able to live up to Apple‘s native routines because they couldn’t access those hardware resources. Makes you think quite a bit about who has an agenda here and why. Don’t even get me started why the companies seem to hate each other so much these days. I have no clue where it’s coming from. Probably it’s the old curse of the greedy trying to get even richer and exploiting every means at their disposal to whack their competitors. Unfortunately neither is in a position they can live without each other, as the symbiosis has gotten so deep, it would hurt both if it came to an end, so we can look forward to more weirdness in this love-hate-relationship in years to come, including CEOs, product managers and many other "suits" acting like kids battling for the shovel in a sand lot.

It’s a good thing, Apple is not in the business of producing fridges and freezers or a whole lot of people probably wouldn’t know how to keep their food cool and prevent it from spoiling. Today’s slightly evasive and shady press announcement that the iPad would be delayed by one more month here in Europe certainly leaves a lot of people quite, quite unhappy. Imagine, you’d have to pre-order a fridge and wait for it 3 months. Kind of reminds me of the times when we were living in a "socialist" country as part of the eastern block and you had to pre-order pretty much anything that was in short supply and if you were lucky, got it after a few months, but mostly only after several years on the waiting list. Anyway, I had my new fridge/ freezer combo delivered just within 3 days and it’s a real nice Liebherr. My other one was getting a bit too hungry for electricity and before ruining myself on that, I rather shell out a few Euros and get me a more efficient model. Incidentally, there’s one lesson here for Apple: Never underestimate market demand and the impatience of your customers. The iPad being so scarce can only mean that the powers themselves didn’t think it would be that popular. Or did they just get cold feet and rushed the release because alternatives like the WePad were sooner ready than they had expected?

Video on the web is everywhere and even I, who dislikes YouTube as much as your granny dislikes your new boyfriend, cannot avoid the occasional odd encounter when people ask for specific effects they like on forums, pointing to those video references. Now for the most part, I really don’t care how it works as long as it works, but apparently some people do and that has lead to an ongoing debate of Flash vs. the rest of the World, or more specifically, Flash vs. HTML5. What really bakes my noodle, is how it calls people, who have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, on the playing field, resulting in such masterpieces as this Spiegel article, very obviously written by some Apple fanboy who got his iPad free with a press review kit. It is equally puzzling, to see everybody at Adobe enter the ring and offer their take on the whole matter. Should they? Are they not just providing cannon fodder for their opponents? What I’m really missing in that regard, is some bigger picture view instead of everybody is just defending his own little agenda. Now let me add my thoughts.

• HTML5 is not an "open standard" in the sense as many would like to believe. It’s neither an OpenSource project, nor does anyone do it for fun and the kindness of his heart. The WHAT WG is a consortium of representatives from big companies and their motivation is certainly not to make you have a good time on the web, but rather define standards that allow them to dump their "content" on you, so they can sell you shit or bombard you with advertising. Of course none of this matters, as long as you get your browser for free, but stop for a minute and think about why.

• At this point, the video tag in HTML5 is nothing but a placeholder for a rudimentary treatment of some of this content. Basically it just says "this is a video", nothing more. It isn’t even clear whether H.264 will become the standard video format and if it does, you are all going to pay for it by having to watch even more advertising so browser manufacturers get returns on the licensing fees they have to pay. Or someone comes up with something completely different and none of this matters in any way.

• Because of the previous point, HTML5 content initially will not be as rich as Flash. Or were you thinking all those fancy features you have become accustomed over the years come out of nowhere? Get real! Video players will look like old VCRs and not provide you with features like markers, comments, links or on-the-fly adjustments. More critically, since none of this is standardized beyond rudimentary playback buttons, you still won’t be able to have the same viewing experience on different sites.

• There is a difference between Flash as a technology and its crappy implementations as Flash (the authoring program) and Flash Player. Crashes and bad performance are signs of bad code, and that is that. There is no point in shifting blame around who is responsible for it – limitations in the browsers’ APIs are just as much part of the problem as are poorly done plug-ins. Yes, Adobe fucks up, but so does Apple. You know, Quicktime crashes just as much.

• To you as a content creator, what actually does it matter in what format you publish content as long as it gets the job done? Flash CS6 could spit out all those JavaScript/ Java archives and associated assets at the click of a button just as it spits out SWF files today. While working in the program, you wouldn’t notice any difference, so what’s the fuss?

Of course all of that sounds quite a bit pro Flash, but think of it: Would you rather have a technology that you can use now and reach a lot of users, regardless of its flaws and limitations, or would you, just because you dislike someone’s technology monopoly, not use it? I know which one I would choose…

Fellow After Effects forum hopper and documentation guy Todd Kopriva has posted a Thank you list on his blog. We all thank him for putting us out in the limelight once more, and promise to be good guys in the future. Still, thanks are good, new computers are better. ;-) So by all means, someone pony up some donations so I can buy either a fancy Core7i system or one of those shiny new MacPros unleashed today. *giggle*