“No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.
”
I was struck by this quote, supposedly coming from the the Steve during a private pep talk about Apple’s relationships with Adobe and Google. Within my industry, rich interaction goes hand in hand with Flash. It has been a personal crusade of mine and many on our team to reintroduce the advantages of HTML to accomplish similar effects. This is made possible through technologies like jquery/mootools/prototype, and thousands of creative programmers. Being someone who only prototypes, not a developer, HTML 5 offers the best of all possible worlds.
I like the strict separation between presentation, markup and behavior that HTML enforces, and flash makes tough. This rigor really adds to being able to iterate quickly as changes occur. Since great interaction is based on ‘getting it right’ in terms of timing, effort, and cognitive load on the user. Still, there are headaches; mainly transparency, PNG support, and of course the ever present IE 6 hacks that keeps flash in business.
So with the introduction of the iPad, I believe Apple will influence things toward the better, if not toward the profitable for companies such as Adobe. For the most part, the <video> tag may take a while to get to speed, but eventually will win out, adding layers of functionality to that tag may.. ouch, late breaking, but Vanessa wrote a much better post on this topic than I was going to. Take it away Vanessa.
My predictions on iPad:
1. The store is the message, this is a razor blade ploy, get the device at a loss and sell software. So Steve becomes a bit Microsoft-y in his old age.
2. All programs will begin with previews of the files you just created in them. Why didn’t anyone do this right, screw the file system, or in the iPad’s case, what file system?
3. Who cares about USB or any physical connection, just beam, sync, email stuff if you want it. The first cloud file system for iPad will be mobileMe, so renew or get your subscription if you don’t have one.
Do I have time for late predictions on the end of Lost?