spinline.net: The Blog

A bitter new controversy is tearing the nation apart: of course, I’m speaking of the lack of Flash capability on the Apple iPad’s browser.

When Flash was originally left off the iPhone, Apple explained it as a concern over performance. Sounds pretty reasonable, as having complicated Flash apps with animation and video running on a mobile phone’s underpowered hardware could present some pretty intolerable performance issues.

Presumably the faster processor employed by the iPad renders the performance issue moot, but Flash is still missing.

The omission of Flash on a phone wasn’t ever such a big deal. The speed issue is real, and I’ve found that while the iPhone is about as good at rendering full-size Web sites as one can reasonably expect from a tiny device, I spend much more time looking at content specifically formatted for the small screen, whether through Web apps such as Google Reader’s mobile version or programs such as Instapaper or the NY Times app.

Users might miss Flash a lot more on the iPad, where they’ll be browsing all their favorite sites in their full-sized glory on a much more generously-sized screen. They’ll be likely to notice that videos on Hulu and mlb.com are gone and their Flash-based games like Farmville and Bejeweled ain’t working.

So? If users don’t like it, they don’t have to use the iPad, and if too many stay away, Apple can reconsider. Meanwhile, Flash makes Web sites bloated and sluggish, and it’s a proprietary format that is contrary the Web’s open ethos. For these and myriad other reasons, Flash sucks.

At the same time, browsers are gaining capabilities for handling video, vector graphics, and animation through the evolution of open Web standards. We’re not quite there yet, bit it’s time for Web sites to get away from Flash and move towards standards, as YouTube is doing.

So anyway, if Apple can’t use performance as an excuse anymore, why leave out Flash support on the Apple tablet? I’m sure they have their own reasons, and those reasons might not all have to do with furthering the welfare of Mankind. Apple gains nothing from bringing people content that depends on proprietary technology that Apple doesn’t control, so it makes sense for them to support open standards over Flash. And as a content gatekeeper, they certainly won’t mind if Hulu users end up buying the same shows on the iTunes Store.

But in this case, Apple’s self-interest coincides with encouraging content providers to make better Web sites. So if they want to freeze Flash out of the iPad, good for them, and good for us.

Sticking to the Iraq pullout is about the only good thing I can think of that Obama’s done, domestic or foreign policy-wise. But let’s see how it all plays out.  Juan Cole:

But Obama’s biggest practical foreign policy success has been in keeping to his withdrawal timetable in Iraq. Most observers have paid too little attention to this, among his most important decisions. When he became president, his top generals, including Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, reportedly came to him and attempted to convince him to modify the withdrawal timeline adopted by the Iraqi parliament as part of the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated shortly before he took office. They did not want US troops to cease patrolling independently in mid-June 2009. They did not want to get all combat troops out by summer 2010. They wanted to finesse the agreement. Reclassify combat troops under some other heading, they said.

Overturning the SOFA or dragging Washington’s feet about it would have produced rage in Baghdad. It had the potential for undermining the government of PM Nouri al-Maliki, and for reinvigorating both Sunni Arab extremists and Shiite radical movements such as the Mahdi Army. It would have made other Arab regimes suspicious of US motives. It would have been a mistake as epochal as the Bush administration’s decision to build up a heavy US military footprint in Afghanistan, which restarted the war there and provoked a major insurgency that continues to this day. In Iraq, a country crawling with armed, nationalistically minded groups and dotted with arms depots, such a move would have been a catastrophe. Obama did the right thing. He overruled his generals and began returning to Iraq its sovereignty.

This issue is important regionally because polling shows that Arab publics say that ending the US military presence in Iraq is the single most important thing the US could do to improve its relations with that region. What they saw as US atrocities in Iraq motivated many of the terrorists active after 2003. Ending the US military role there will bring a sea change. (Only 4% of Arabs say that they are exercised by the issue of Afghanistan, so that is not the same thing in their eyes).

With this post, I will hereby attempt rectify the severe case of spinline.net The Blog withdrawal that I have undoubtedly subjected my legions of readers to the past so-and-so months. So hop in, strap yourselves in, and let’s GO, BABY!

• So first off, head to Conservative Donnybrook for my thoughts on Harry Reid and the upcoming crash in China.
• John Siracusa posts a Mac-geek-licious retrospective of his decade of epic reviews of Mac OS X releases, dating back to the early developer previews. It’s weird to think of those early days of the Return of Jobs, when the jury was still out on whether the Mac as a platform could survive at all, the success of the adorable new iMac notwithstanding. “Classic” Mac OS was very, very long in the tooth and extremely crash-prone, as I can recall from bitter experience. It annoys me just thinking back on it. GRRRR! But the success of the upcoming OS X was hardly assured, and it did seem plenty ambitious, slow, and resource-hungry at the time. Anyway, glad it all worked out.
• So Sam Raimi and Tobey McGuire are out of the Spider-Man franchise, and the whole thing is going to be rebooted. No Spider-Man 4 in 2011. Well, this strikes me as a pretty horrible move for the studio. But still, Spider-Man 3 was pretty disappointing, and maybe there wasn’t much left in the tank, so perhaps it’s for the best to get a fresh take on the franchise, even if it doesn’t have much of a chance of matching the success of Raimi’s. Anyway, as long as I’m feeling all nostalgic, I’ll tell a little story. The first time I heard anything about Raimi’s Spider-Man was when the preview came on before The Phantom Menace — opening night, midnight showing. It was awesome, and it blew everyone in the audience away. Every geek in that audience, including me, sat spellbound through that trailer. At the end, McGuire’s voiceover went, “Who am I? I’m Spiderman.” The logo flashed up on the screen, the music pumped, and the theater erupted in cheers. It was really an electrifying moment of mass communal geek bliss. That trailer was definitely the high point of the evening, given what a pile of horseshit Episode I turned out to be.
• Bob Murphy notes that Adolph Hitler doesn’t show up in the list of suggestions that drops down on the Google home page when you type in a search. Steve Sailer discovers another name Google doesn’t seem to recognize: Pat Buchanan!
• That’s all for now, bye!