&lt;p&gt;More information from Mike Chambers on how the Flash Player plugin for Android works with regard to scrolling. The key is that you double-tap to zoom the Flash element to full screen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mike Chambers on Scrolling With Flash Content on Touch Devices’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/chambers-scrolling"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Chait:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;You can imagine how this feels to conservatives. They&amp;#8217;ve already run off the field, sprayed themselves with champagne and taunted the losing team&amp;#8217;s fans. And now the other team is saying the game is still on and they have a good chance to win. There may be nothing wrong at all with the process, but it&amp;#8217;s certainly going to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; like some kind of crime to the right-wing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Coming Conservative Health Care Freakout’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/chait"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Phil Schiller comments to The New York Times&amp;#8217;s Jenna Wortham regarding Apple&amp;#8217;s recent decision to remove sexually titillating apps from the App Store. I like how The Times uses the adjective &amp;#8220;blue&amp;#8221;. (I also love how The New York Times has published an article mentioning an app named &amp;#8220;Dirty Fingers&amp;#8221;.) I &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/porno-app-store"&gt;used &amp;#8220;porno&amp;#8221;&lt;/a&gt; the other day, but that&amp;#8217;s clearly not just what&amp;#8217;s been removed. I think the best adjective to describe what&amp;#8217;s no longer allowed is &amp;#8220;sexy&amp;#8221;. The problem, though (in addition to the fact that saying &amp;#8220;sexy apps are not allowed&amp;#8221; sounds silly), is this:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Indeed, a Sports Illustrated application tied to its annual swimsuit issue was still available for download on Monday, as was one from Playboy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When asked about the Sports Illustrated app, Mr. Schiller said Apple took the source and intent of an app into consideration. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#8217;t see how it&amp;#8217;s anything other than hypocrisy to say that Time Warner can have an app showing swimsuit models and others cannot. I totally understand Apple&amp;#8217;s desire to keep the App Store free of flat-out or even borderline pornography. I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; think it&amp;#8217;s wise to remove/ban R-rated content, though &amp;#8212; isn&amp;#8217;t that exactly what the 17+ rating is for?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But to allow Sports Illustrated and Playboy to publish it and others not? That&amp;#8217;s bullshit.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘NYT: &amp;#8216;Apple Purges Blue Apps From Online Store&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/app-store-sexy-apps"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Frame rates seem good. But it seems like the battery drains noticeably over the course of 6 or 7 minutes. It looks to me like it drops from about 50 to 25 percent in just 8 minutes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;By the way, my big question about Flash Player for Android is whether Google has any plans to include it with the system by default, and if not, which (if any) handset makers do.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Demo Video Showing Flash Player 10.1 on Google Nexus One’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/flash-android"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s how John Dowdell of Adobe &amp;#8220;would prefer Apple communicate&amp;#8221;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Get your CEO to either talk, or not. Put some skin in the game, put your rep on the line with attributed statements. The lack of confirmation, denial, or clarification from Apple PR about rumored quotes from The Great Man is telling.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;What a great idea. Respond to every rumored quote attributed to Steve Jobs with a confirmation, denial, or clarification. I&amp;#8217;m sure Apple will get right on that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘How John Dowdell Wants Apple to Talk’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/dowdell"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Mike Chambers, responding to &lt;a href="http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/"&gt;this piece at Roughly Drafted&lt;/a&gt;, shows that the only mouse events Flash Player doesn&amp;#8217;t have on touchscreens are those for right and middle buttons, and scroll wheels. Hover and mousemove events &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; work. The problem, though, for a hypothetical Flash plugin that renders pages within web pages (as on traditional desktop browsers), is how to tell whether a tap-and-drag within a Flash element is supposed to scroll the entire web page or be passed as a mouse movement event to the Flash element. It can&amp;#8217;t do both, and it can&amp;#8217;t read the user&amp;#8217;s mind. (You can see these problems with straight HTML in MobileSafari today &amp;#8212; it&amp;#8217;s cumbersome to scroll a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;textarea&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; field within a web page because a single finger tap-and-drag within the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;textarea&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; control still scrolls the entire page, not the text content inside the control.) This is one reason why, when you play a movie embedded in a web page on MobileSafari, it always switches you to a full-screen movie player view. Perhaps you could do that with a mobile browser Flash plugin, but except for Flash content that was designed to fit on a small screen, how do you allow the user to both scroll/pan the content &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; pass mousemove and hover events to the underlying content? I&amp;#8217;m interested to see how the upcoming Android Flash Player solves this.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s not so much that you &lt;em&gt;can&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; use mouse-centric UIs on a touchscreen, but that they&amp;#8217;re inherently awkward.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flash Player Content, Mouse Events, and Touch Input’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/22/flash-touch"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Stream your movies, pictures, and music to your Xbox or PS3 with Rivet. Use coupon DARINGFIRE2010 to receive a 25% discount (this week only).&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/9363515820"&gt;Wil Shipley on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, presumably in response to &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/19/coldeway"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; (and where by &amp;#8220;other platforms&amp;#8221;, Shipley apparently means &amp;#8220;Microsoft Windows&amp;#8221;):&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hmm, @gruber ignores that Flash on other platforms can and does use hardware H.264 decoding, but Apple won’t give Adobe access.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#8217;t mention the issue yesterday, no, but I wrote &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash#performance"&gt;a whole section about it in this piece&lt;/a&gt; a few weeks ago, and I specifically linked to Adobe&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/#FAQ"&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641"&gt;weblog entry&lt;/a&gt; on the issue.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think the issue is a red herring, spin from Adobe intended to share the blame for Flash&amp;#8217;s Mac OS X performance with Apple. First, Flash performance gripes are not limited to H.264 video playback. &lt;em&gt;Everything&lt;/em&gt; Flash Player does is slower on Mac OS X than Windows. What&amp;#8217;s Adobe&amp;#8217;s excuse for Flash&amp;#8217;s performance on non-H.264 video?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Second, even Apple&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html"&gt;QuickTime on Snow Leopard&lt;/a&gt; only &lt;a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2009/06/10/snow-leopard-h-264-hardware-acceleration-and-opencl-requirements/"&gt;makes use of H.264 hardware acceleration with a single graphics card&lt;/a&gt;: the Nvidia 9400M. If you don&amp;#8217;t have that graphics card in your Mac, you don&amp;#8217;t get H.264 hardware acceleration, period. That card is used across the board in current MacBooks and Mac Minis, but there are an awful lot of older Macs in use &amp;#8212; a majority I&amp;#8217;d wager &amp;#8212; which don&amp;#8217;t have that card. It&amp;#8217;s also not present in current brand-new Mac Pros and most iMacs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Third, no one is complaining about the lack of hardware acceleration for other video playback software on Mac OS X, like &lt;a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html"&gt;VLC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://code.google.com/p/movist/"&gt;Movist&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://perian.org/"&gt;Perian&lt;/a&gt;, or even (as mentioned in the previous paragraph) QuickTime itself on machines without the Nvidia 9400M. Even if we concede the point that Flash Player&amp;#8217;s lack of access to H.264 hardware acceleration on Mac OS X inherently blocks it from matching its H.264 playback performance on Windows, I fail to understand how that blocks it from matching the performance of other video playback software on Mac OS X itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Fourth, hardware accelerated H.264 support is &lt;a href="http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf"&gt;a new feature in the as-yet-unreleased Flash Player 10.1&lt;/a&gt;. It in no way explains the performance difference in Flash Player 10.0 on Mac OS X and Windows.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, does anyone really think it would be a good idea for web content plugins to have direct access to graphics card hardware? Is it absurd to think that it&amp;#8217;s a reasonable OS design to limit &lt;em&gt;plugins&lt;/em&gt; to higher-level APIs? Should Flash Player be a kernel extension, so that it can ensure it gets plenty of CPU cycles and have direct access to whatever hardware it wants?&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/"&gt;Macworld Expo&lt;/a&gt; 2010 kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. Is it going to fly without Apple? I don&amp;#8217;t know. I don&amp;#8217;t think anyone does yet. Apple&amp;#8217;s traditional presence at Macworld was so large, both figuratively (with the attention paid to their keynote address) and literally (with their massive booth on the show floor), that their absence has effectively rendered Macworld a new event. I think it&amp;#8217;s smart that IDG moved the date back a month; anything they could do to emphasize that it&amp;#8217;s going to be new and different this year can only help. (I have no idea if it was feasible, but if it had been, I&amp;#8217;d have advised moving the show across the street to Moscone West, just to make it &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; different, too.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#8217;s absence will be felt in two ways. First, the lack of an Apple keynote address has significantly diminished the amount of media attention. That was inevitable. But it wasn&amp;#8217;t really Macworld Expo, the trade show and conference, that was garnering that attention. It was Apple itself. Apple&amp;#8217;s keynotes really didn&amp;#8217;t have much at all to do with the exhibit floor or conference sessions. I suppose there were some number of attendees who considered attending the keynote as a major reason to buy a conference pass, but percentage-wise only a small number of attendees could ever see the keynotes in person. It&amp;#8217;s not like Apple hasn&amp;#8217;t given us much to talk about recently &amp;#8212; hello, iPad &amp;#8212; it just wasn&amp;#8217;t announced at Macworld itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The more worrisome factor for me is Apple&amp;#8217;s absence from the show floor. They had a huge booth in a prominent spot and they drew people in. The role they played on the show floor is very much analogous, I think, to the role played by a big department store like Macy&amp;#8217;s or Nordstrom at a shopping mall.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;To me, though, the reason to walk the show floor has always been about the small companies &amp;#8212; often the &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; small ones. The ones where the employees manning the booth are the engineers and designers who made the product they&amp;#8217;re promoting. I&amp;#8217;ve been to a bunch of Macworld Expos and I never once failed to discover at least one fascinating product by walking the show floor. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In terms of what&amp;#8217;s going on other than the trade show, I&amp;#8217;ve long thought that the inordinate amount of front-loaded attention paid to Apple&amp;#8217;s keynote address drew attention away from the fact that Macworld has turned into a large and successful conference, with tracks spanning everything from programming to graphic design.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Nothing could replace a Steve Jobs keynote address, so, wisely, they&amp;#8217;re not trying. Instead, Macworld has scheduled a &lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/fp"&gt;bunch of featured speakers&lt;/a&gt; throughout the week, including David Pogue, Kevin Smith (yes, &lt;a href="http://www.viewaskew.com/"&gt;that Kevin Smith&lt;/a&gt;), Leo Laporte, and, yours truly. &lt;a href="http://macworldexpo.com/sessions?s=QSHOWA0005AZ"&gt;I&amp;#8217;ll be speaking Friday at 4:30pm&lt;/a&gt;, where I&amp;#8217;ll share the secret recipes for my award-winning cupcakes and melt-in-your-mouth croissants.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;(DF readers: you can register for the show using the discount code &amp;#8220;GRUBER&amp;#8221; to get a &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; expo pass that will get you into my talk (and the show floor, and the other feature presentations). That code is also good for a 20 percent discount on any of the conferences. Just keep in mind that with that code, it&amp;#8217;s &lt;em&gt;totally free&lt;/em&gt; to come see my talk and the other feature presentations.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The bottom line for me is that the potential is there for Macworld to remain a great show. Imagine if there&amp;#8217;d never been a Macworld Expo before, and that this was the first year. It wouldn&amp;#8217;t be surprising that Apple declined to participate. But is there demand for a days-long nerdfest for Mac and iPhone professionals and aficionados? I say yes.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Some good questions &lt;a href="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/01/31/whatIfFlashWereAnOpenStand.html"&gt;from Dave Winer regarding Apple, Adobe, and Flash&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;What if Apple were trying to erase something that&amp;#8217;s not company-owned? Either a formal or de facto standard? Further, what if their alternative were something that was locked-down and owned by a company? Further, what if the company was Apple?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;d say that&amp;#8217;d be a different ball of wax entirely. It would depend, for one thing, on the specific open / de facto standard technology.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But as for open &lt;em&gt;web&lt;/em&gt; standards, the evidence &amp;#8212; actions and shipping code, not just words &amp;#8212; strongly indicate that Apple is a major proponent of them. Apple didn&amp;#8217;t have to release WebKit as an open source project &amp;#8212; they could have kept their extensions atop the LGPL-licensed WebCore private.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2010-02-01"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2010-02-01"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; They&amp;#8217;ve re-written WebKit&amp;#8217;s JavaScript engine from scratch at least twice, and released it all as open source. (Apple has also been aggressive about releasing its advanced non-web developer technology, &lt;a href="http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Conceptual/Blocks/Articles/00_Introduction.html"&gt;like blocks and LLVM&lt;/a&gt;, as liberally-licensed open source.) All of Apple&amp;#8217;s top competitors in the mobile space have either already adopted WebKit or soon will: Android, WebOS, even BlackBerry. Members of Apple&amp;#8217;s WebKit team have been helping drive HTML5 since its inception. In short, I&amp;#8217;d say Apple likes its technology open and its products closed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;E.g., it makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.&lt;sup id="fnr2-2010-02-01"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn2-2010-02-01"&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I do understand &lt;a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/31/ipad-review-comments-naughton"&gt;the fear&lt;/a&gt;. It&amp;#8217;s indisputable that Apple seeks large amounts of control over its products. So it&amp;#8217;s a reasonable question to ask whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a problem. I don&amp;#8217;t think that&amp;#8217;s the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it &amp;#8212; HTML, CSS, JavaScript. No one can tell them what to do with WebKit; they wait for no one to shape and bend WebKit to suit their needs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My feeling is not that Apple seeks total control over all content and software in iPhone OS. I&amp;#8217;d say it&amp;#8217;s more like they&amp;#8217;re providing two well-defined, nice, neat, easily-understood extremes: the totally controlled native Cocoa Touch, and the totally open web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Winer ends with a suggestion for Adobe:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple&amp;#8217;s court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;That&amp;#8217;d be an interesting move, and it would certainly shake things up. But what if the source code to Flash Player is &amp;#8212; as many would wager &amp;#8212; a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It&amp;#8217;s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It&amp;#8217;s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened &amp;#8212; or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE &amp;#8212; the web has already moved on.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2010-02-01"&gt; &lt;p&gt;An earlier version of this article stated that the entirety of WebKit is BSD-licensed. That&amp;#8217;s wrong; the &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML"&gt;KHTML library&lt;/a&gt; that Apple started with is LGPL-licensed, and so therefore is the WebCore component in WebKit. We regret the error.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2010-02-01" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li id="fn2-2010-02-01"&gt; &lt;p&gt;H.264 is an open standard, but admittedly and unfortunately &lt;a href="http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/"&gt;not a free standard&lt;/a&gt;, hence Mozilla&amp;#8217;s opposition to it. My point here is simply that H.264 is not owned by Apple or any other single company.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr2-2010-02-01" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Robert Scoble &lt;a href="http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/30/can-flash-be-saved/"&gt;has a good analogy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Let’s go back a few years to when Firefox was just coming on the scene. Remember that? I remember that it didn’t work with a ton of websites. Things like banks, e-commerce sites, and others. Why not? Because those sites were coded specifically for the dominant Internet Explorer back then.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Some people thought Firefox was going to fail because of these broken links. Just like &lt;a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/apples_ipad_--_a_broken_link.html"&gt;Adobe is trying to say that Apple’s iPad is going to fail&lt;/a&gt; because of its own set of broken links.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But just a few years later and have you seen a site that doesn’t work on Firefox? I haven’t.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What happened? Firefox FORCED developers to get on board with the standards-based web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The same thing is happening now, based on my talks with developers: they are not including Flash in their future web plans any longer.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Regarding those blue boxes that indicate embedded Flash content in MobileSafari, think of it this way: Who can make them go away?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adobe can&amp;#8217;t. They can&amp;#8217;t put Flash Player on iPhone OS on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apple could, &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash"&gt;but they won&amp;#8217;t&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users could make Apple change its mind by refusing to buy iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads because they don&amp;#8217;t support Flash. That does not seem to be happening. In fact, iPhone sales are accelerating.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Web site producers could do it, by replacing or providing an alternative to the Flash content on their sites.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/29/porno-flash"&gt;initial reaction to the iPad&lt;/a&gt; seems to be geared toward #3 &amp;#8212; emphasizing publicly that iPhone OS devices are not capable of rendering the (admittedly, substantial amounts of) Flash content on the web today. Good luck with that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Adobe&amp;#8217;s fear, of course, is that #4 is what will happen. And with good reason, since I think it&amp;#8217;s fair to say that we&amp;#8217;re seeing this happen already. Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow &lt;a href="http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703"&gt;made his little poster&lt;/a&gt; showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they&amp;#8217;re missing anything because, well, they&amp;#8217;re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigiphoto/4314276957/"&gt;Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version&lt;/a&gt; of Brimelow&amp;#8217;s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The explanation is simple. Web site producers tend to be practical. Those that use Flash do so not because they&amp;#8217;re Flash proponents, but because Flash is easy and ubiquitous. Few technologies get to 100 percent market penetration; Flash came remarkably close. A few years ago you could say that, effectively, Flash was everywhere. It made total sense for sites like YouTube and Hulu to go with Flash.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There&amp;#8217;s a big difference between &amp;#8220;everywhere&amp;#8221; and &amp;#8220;almost everywhere&amp;#8221;. Adobe&amp;#8217;s own statistics on Flash&amp;#8217;s market penetration &lt;a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html"&gt;claim 99 percent penetration&lt;/a&gt; as of last month. That&amp;#8217;s because, according to their &lt;a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/methodology/"&gt;survey methodology&lt;/a&gt;, they&amp;#8217;re only counting &amp;#8220;PCs&amp;#8221; &amp;#8212; which ignores the entire sort of devices which have brought about this debate. Adobe is arguing that Flash is installed on 99 percent of all web browsers that support Flash, not 99 percent of all web browsers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That&amp;#8217;s no longer true, and Adobe&amp;#8217;s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What&amp;#8217;s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn&amp;#8217;t care about what&amp;#8217;s good for Adobe. They care about what&amp;#8217;s good for Hulu. Hulu isn&amp;#8217;t a &lt;em&gt;Flash&lt;/em&gt; site, it&amp;#8217;s a &lt;em&gt;video&lt;/em&gt; site. Developers go where the users are.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Four months after debuting as the top-of-the-line Android handset, the Droid is now selling on Amazon for just $50 (with a Verizon contract). Still can&amp;#8217;t upgrade it to Android OS 2.1, either. (&lt;a href="http://twitter.com/counternotions/status/9610547225"&gt;Via Kontra&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Motorola Droid Now Just $50 at Amazon’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/droid-amazon"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Pure web app e-book reader for iPhone and Android. Install it on your iPhone home screen and it acts like a regular app, including the use of local storage for your saved books.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Ibis Reader’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/ibis"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s not in the store yet, but there&amp;#8217;s a new &amp;#8220;Explicit&amp;#8221; category in the form developers use when submitting apps.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Oops, maybe not. &lt;a href="http://gizmodo.com/5479497/apple-removes-explicit-option-from-itunes"&gt;Gizmodo is reporting&lt;/a&gt; that the &amp;#8220;Explicit&amp;#8221; category has been removed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘ Apple May Be Adding ‘Explicit’ Section to App Store’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/explicit"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The guys who made the video demonstration of the Flash Player 10.1 beta argue that battery performance isn&amp;#8217;t a problem:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Our own tests show that video can be played for well over 3 hours over Wi-Fi from YouTube in H.264 (Baseline 1.2).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you think that sounds good, note that the Nexus One is &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/googlephone/m/hardware_complete_specs.html"&gt;rated for 7 hours of video playback time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Flash Player 10.1 Battery Performance on the Android Nexus One’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/flash-battery"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ashlee Vance, reporting for the NYT on HP&amp;#8217;s failure in the mobile market:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sales of HP&amp;#8217;s hand-held products, including its iPaq smartphone, dropped to $25 million in the quarter, down from $57 million in the same period last year. Apple, by contrast, had sales of $5.6 billion for iPhones and related products during its most recent quarter.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;HP’s anemic performance in the smartphone market has left analysts perplexed.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;There&amp;#8217;s nothing perplexing about it. HP doesn&amp;#8217;t have their own mobile OS. Instead they banked on Windows Mobile, and Windows Mobile stinks.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘HP&amp;#8217;s Failure in Mobile Phones’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/hp-mobile"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Now that the whole thing has been posted to YouTube, you can watch from Flash-less devices such as your iPhone or Apple TV, or even sans Flash on your Mac if you&amp;#8217;ve signed up for &lt;a href="http://www.youtube.com/html5"&gt;YouTube&amp;#8217;s HTML5 beta&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘YouTube Version of Your Humble Narrator&amp;#8217;s Macworld Feature Presentation’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/youtube-mwsf-2010"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Check out the side-by-side comparison late in the video of the time it takes to launch 10 apps simultaneously from an SSD versus a traditional hard disk.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘SSDs and the MacBook Pro’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/24/ssd-mbp"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#8217;ll never guess who&amp;#8217;s leading the charges against them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘EU Opens Antitrust Investigation Into Google ’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/eu"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Shaun Inman&amp;#8217;s upcoming iPhone platform game. You collect power-ups not to upgrade your character but to upgrade the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt;. Looks glorious.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mimeo and the Kleptopus King’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/mimeo"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Nice interview, and if you haven&amp;#8217;t checked out &lt;a href="http://www.riverfold.com/software/clipstart/"&gt;Clipstart&lt;/a&gt;, you should. (Click the &amp;#8220;Download MOV file&amp;#8221; link to get a nice big H.264 version right in Safari.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Merlin Mann Interviews Clipstart Developer Manton Reece at Macworld’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/merlin-manton"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Paraphrased transcript from Dan Frommer:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple&amp;#8217;s revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could say that is an oil company.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you want to understand Apple Inc., listen to Tim Cook.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tim Cook Q&amp;amp;A Session at Goldman Sachs Conference’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/cook-goldman"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;So great.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Justin Van Genderen&amp;#8217;s Minimalist Star Wars Tourism Posters’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/genderen"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;From the department of tags I never expected to create for DF posts: &amp;#8220;Sexy Apps&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Daisy Mae&amp;#8217; Game Pulled From the App Store; a Few Days Later, It&amp;#8217;s Back In’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/daisy-mae"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My list of the top ten issues facing Apple, presented at Macworld Expo earlier this month. Thanks to everyone who was there &amp;#8212; it was a great audience.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Your Humble Narrator&amp;#8217;s Presentation From Macworld 2010’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/macworld-presentation"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://curvedwhite.com/post/405144449/minimalist-movie-posters-by-eduardo-prox"&gt;Via Curved White&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Minimalist Movie Posters By Eduardo Pox’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/poxsters"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Tim Berners-Lee:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I agree with the WG chairs that these items &amp;#8212; data and canvas &amp;#8212; are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tim Berners-Lee Rejects Adobe&amp;#8217;s HTML5 Procedural Arguments’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/tbl"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Including great families like DIN and Meta. Even better, they &lt;a href="http://blog.typekit.com/2010/02/23/buy-fonts-at-fontshop-host-them-on-typekit/"&gt;work with Typekit&lt;/a&gt; for cross-browser compatibility and ease-of-use.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘FontShop Now Licensing Web Fonts’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/fontshop-web"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Reuters:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sirius XM Radio Inc. posted its first quarterly profit since its merger and said it expected to add 500,000 new subscribers in 2010 as the recovery in the car market boosts demand for satellite radio.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Looks like they&amp;#8217;re going to make it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Sirius Posts Profit, Sees Big Subscriber Growth’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/sirius"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this is the pessimistic take on the &amp;#8220;What happens to Apple post-Jobs?&amp;#8221; question:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Palm is basically Apple, Jr. And if a bunch of Apple geniuses can&amp;#8217;t kick butt on their own at Palm, how are they going to kick butt without Steve at Apple?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;He has a point, insofar as that Palm &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; staffed with many former Apple employees, and, in terms of design and feel and concept, WebOS is the most Apple-like, by far, of any other software platform in the world. But Frommer&amp;#8217;s logical presumption that Palm&amp;#8217;s former Apple employees are interchangeable with those who are at Apple today is headache-inducing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Worse, with regard to mobile, today&amp;#8217;s Palm &amp;#8212; the Rubinstein-led, stocked with former Apple people, WebOS Palm &amp;#8212; only came into existence &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the iPhone debuted. For the sake of argument we can concede that the team at Palm today is just as talented as the team under Jobs at Apple and it still might not be enough to dig the new Palm out of the hole it started in.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As I stated in my talk at Macworld this month, what Apple will be like post-Jobs is simply unknowable. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Dan Frommer Says Palm&amp;#8217;s Decline &amp;#8216;Shows That Apple Is Screwed Without Steve Jobs&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/steve-jobs"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Pushing the limits of per-post art (and code) direction. Geoffrey Grosenbach explains in detail how it works.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘About PeepCode&amp;#8217;s Blog’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/peepcode-blog"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Smart stuff. (&lt;a href="http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/apple_posts_webcast_of_their_presentation_at_the_goldman_sachs_tech_conf/"&gt;Via MacDailyNews&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple Posts Audio From Tim Cook&amp;#8217;s Q&amp;amp;A Session at Goldman Sachs Conference’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/cook-audio"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Very odd, since (a) there doesn&amp;#8217;t seem to be anything even vaguely &amp;#8220;objectionable&amp;#8221; anywhere on the company&amp;#8217;s weblog, and (b) even if there were, what business is it of Citibank&amp;#8217;s?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Fabulis describes itself as a &amp;#8220;network that connects gay men with amazing experiences down the block and around the world&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Citibank Blocks Bank Account of Startup Fabulis, Citing &amp;#8216;Objectionable Content&amp;#8217; on Company Weblog’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/fabulis"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Not good.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Palm Slashes Guidance, Stock Tanks’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/palm"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&amp;#8220;Exhibition&amp;#8221; or not, this was a great match. I particularly loved the cohesive branding they established.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Khoi Vinh and Nicholas Felton Comment on Their Layer Tennis Match Last Week’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/vinh-felton"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Dan Frakes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;As usual, there were also a number of off-beat comments and questions, ranging from suggestions that Apple invest in Tesla Motors (Jobs: “We were thinking of a toga party, actually”) [&amp;#8230;]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Dan Frakes on Apple&amp;#8217;s Shareholders Meeting’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/frakes-shareholders"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Great story.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Find My iPhone&amp;#8217; Rescues Two Stolen Phones at Busch Gardens’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/find-my-iphone"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Philip Elmer-DeWitt, relaying information from unnamed attendees at today&amp;#8217;s Apple shareholders meeting:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Another shareholder then asked a longwinded Q about what Apple/Jobs fears. &amp;#8220;What keeps you awake at night?&amp;#8221; … Jobs deadpans: &amp;#8220;Shareholders meetings.&amp;#8221; Audience erupts in laughter.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Inside Apple&amp;#8217;s Shareholders Meeting’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/jobs-shareholders"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;He had me until the triple-bang to end the thing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘ Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein&amp;#8217;s Letter to Employees’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/26/rubinstein"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dr. Strangelove&lt;/em&gt; is out on Blu-ray and it&amp;#8217;s magnificent. (Buy it from Amazon and I&amp;#8217;ll get a kickback.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘‘Mandrake, Have You Ever Seen a Commie Drink a Glass of Water? Vodka, That’s What They Drink. Never Water.’’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/25/strangelove"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;So with this whole thing where &lt;a href="http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=apple+sexy+apps&amp;amp;scoring=a&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ned=us&amp;amp;um=1&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;sugg=d&amp;amp;as_ldate=2010/01&amp;amp;as_hdate=2010/01&amp;amp;lnav=hist0"&gt;Apple has removed and banned&lt;/a&gt; like 5,000 &amp;#8220;sexy apps&amp;#8221; from the App Store, I think I&amp;#8217;ve figured out the reason why, including why they&amp;#8217;re &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/app-store-sexy-apps"&gt;granting exceptions&lt;/a&gt; to established names like Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Victoria&amp;#8217;s Secret. It&amp;#8217;s about branding. Let me just state right here up front that I don&amp;#8217;t agree with or like how they&amp;#8217;re doing this. I&amp;#8217;m just trying to make sense of it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s easier, though, to first run through what this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ve seen a lot of speculation that the exceptions are about money. I.e. that Apple wanted to ban the sexy apps but left the big-name ones in because they don&amp;#8217;t want to lose their 30 percent cut of the money these apps generate. That doesn&amp;#8217;t hold water, though &amp;#8212; a slew of apps that &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been banned were top sellers, established brand names or not. If it were just about revenue, Apple would have left them all in the store.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-apples-absurd-double-standard-boobs-skin-and-sex-apps-are-fine-when-big-media-makes-them-2010-2"&gt;Henry Blodget speculates&lt;/a&gt; that the established brand-name exceptions are about setting up deals for iPad apps from the companies behind them. But that&amp;#8217;s just a variation on the &amp;#8220;it&amp;#8217;s about the money&amp;#8221; argument. Again, if Apple&amp;#8217;s interest here was about money, they wouldn&amp;#8217;t be banning any of these apps in the first place. Apple is not going to be hard up for iPad apps and content. If anything, I suspect the problem with iPad apps will be just like that with iPhone apps &amp;#8212; too many of them, not too few.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2010-02-25"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2010-02-25"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Another iPad-related theory &amp;#8212; suggested by several DF readers via email &amp;#8212; is that it&amp;#8217;s about the education market. The idea being that Apple wants to sell iPads to schools and therefore wants anything even remotely objectionable out of the App Store. But institutional iPads will be managed devices, just like &amp;#8220;enterprise&amp;#8221; iPhones are today. Students using a school-owned iPad won&amp;#8217;t be able to install apps from the App Store, so it doesn&amp;#8217;t really matter which apps are for sale.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lastly, if you think about it, it&amp;#8217;s clearly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about banning porno and bikini-clad-semi-porno from the iPhone entirely. &lt;a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/apple-iphone-pornography-ban/"&gt;MG Siegler writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple is going through all this trouble of removing these apps, and creating more work in scanning for the next sexy apps to reject, when built into every iPhone and iPod touch is not one, but two huge entry points for explicit material &amp;#8212; and both are apps made by Apple themselves. The first, I alluded to above: iTunes. There are no shortage of films and TV shows with nudity and sexual content (along with violence and everything else) that are available on iTunes for purchase on the device. The same is true for explicit music.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But the second app is far worse: Safari. Each iPhone and iPod touch has a web browser that is more than capable of accessing any site on the web with a few clicks. This includes sites with hardcore pornography, or anything else a teenage kid can dream up. Apple is going through all this trouble to block sexy apps (which have never contained nudity, by the way, just sexy pictures), when they offer one of their own that makes it much easier to find far more sinister content.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Siegler is correct that MobileSafari is completely open to anything and everything published on the web. But he draws the wrong conclusion. Apple isn&amp;#8217;t futilely trying to ban this sort of content from the iPhone. They&amp;#8217;re just removing it from the App Store. Think about a physical world analogy to the retail Apple Stores. There&amp;#8217;s all sorts of software (and hardware) you can buy and install for Macs that Apple would never sell in their stores.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The purest representation of the Apple brand is Apple&amp;#8217;s own &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/23/cook-goldman"&gt;remarkably small&lt;/a&gt; (for a company of its size) lineup of products. Retail Apple Stores (and Apple&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://store.apple.com/"&gt;web store&lt;/a&gt;) are a slightly expanded representation of its brand &amp;#8212; they sell many third-party products, but they are carefully selected by Apple itself.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The App Store is looser. The vast majority of the 150,000+ available titles would not be there if Apple were managing the App Store the way they manage their retail stores. It&amp;#8217;s &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; that it&amp;#8217;s looser. It almost has to be. (It&amp;#8217;s pretty hard to find people complaining that Apple allows too &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; titles into the App Store.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But, still, Apple sees the App Store as an extension of the Apple brand. That&amp;#8217;s why flat-out pornography has never been and never will be allowed. You can walk into a Barnes and Noble and buy a copy of Maxim, but you won&amp;#8217;t find a copy of Hustler. Not because Hustler wouldn&amp;#8217;t sell, but because selling pornography goes against the Barnes and Noble brand.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think what Apple was getting squeamish about wasn&amp;#8217;t the sexy apps themselves, but the cheesiness that the sexy apps (and their prominence in best selling lists) was bestowing upon the general feel and vibe of the App Store. One thing I wasn&amp;#8217;t aware of before the recent crackdown was the degree to which these apps were seeping into various non-entertainment categories. E.g., like half the &amp;#8220;new&amp;#8221; apps in the &amp;#8220;productivity&amp;#8221; category featured imagery of large-breasted bikini-clad women.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The App Store is never going to be like Apple&amp;#8217;s retail stores, and Apple knows it. Apple&amp;#8217;s retail stores, branding-wise, convey an image sort of like between the Gap and Banana Republic &amp;#8212; friendly premium. The App Store is more Old Navy, or maybe even Target. But these sexy apps were casting the App Store into something junkier, bordering on the skeevy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What iPhone users choose to access through MobileSafari doesn&amp;#8217;t reflect on Apple. But what is listed in the App Store &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; reflect on Apple. What you see when you peruse the App Store effectively &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the App Store.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So what I see as hypocritical about Apple&amp;#8217;s decision here is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about the fact that you can access the same sort of content via MobileSafari, but rather about the exceptions granted to Sports Illustrated, etc. I see &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;: Sports Illustrated, Victoria&amp;#8217;s Secret, and Playboy are not just strong brands but also &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt; brands. But who&amp;#8217;s to say some new brand couldn&amp;#8217;t be just as good? The best apps in all sorts of categories across the board in the App Store are frequently from new companies, building new brands. It&amp;#8217;s no more fair for the &amp;#8220;hot chicks in bikinis&amp;#8221; category to be occupied solely by existing major brands like Sports Illustrated/Victoria&amp;#8217;s Secret/Playboy than it would be if the, say, photo manipulation category were occupied solely by Adobe and Corel, or if games were only allowed from companies like EA.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If Apple&amp;#8217;s going to allow any of these apps, they ought to allow all of them. They should be evaluated by content, not by the names submitting them. If Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t want these apps boogering up the best-seller lists in various categories across the App Store, they should assign them all to a single category. (Tough job: finding a name for that category.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The other thing that bothers me, and ought to bother Apple, is the obvious capriciousness with which these apps were removed. These apps were allowed for about a year and a half. Some developers were prospering by them. And then, boom, they were gone. The reason Apple ought to be concerned about this is that it unsettles &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; developers &amp;#8212; even those whose apps and &lt;em&gt;ideas for future apps&lt;/em&gt; were nowhere along the lines of girls-in-bikinis. What developers see here isn&amp;#8217;t Apple managing its own brand. What developers see is that the App Store is a shaky foundation upon which to build a business. One day you&amp;#8217;re prospering, the next day your app is gone. There are awesome iPhone OS apps that aren&amp;#8217;t being built because developers don&amp;#8217;t trust Apple not to yank the carpet out from underneath them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple sees the App Store as an aspect of its brand. Developers see the App Store as the entirety of the Cocoa Touch platform. This is a significant conflict. Developers, if rejected from the App Store, can freely deliver whatever content they choose through MobileSafari &amp;#8212; but you can&amp;#8217;t reuse compiled Cocoa Touch apps that way. The work invested in a native app can only be recouped through the App Store.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s entrepreneurism to be willing to take your chances in the market. It&amp;#8217;s healthy skepticism to worry about being locked out of the market after you&amp;#8217;ve already invested heavily in building your product.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2010-02-25"&gt; &lt;p&gt;The cynical take on these exceptions, if you don&amp;#8217;t buy my branding argument, is that Apple might have decided not to antagonize those companies with large, talented, corporate legal departments.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2010-02-25" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My thanks to The Little App Factory for sponsoring this week&amp;#8217;s DF RSS feed to promote Rivet. Rivet lets you stream your movies, photos, and music from your Mac to your Xbox 360 or PS3. It integrates with iTunes and iPhoto (and Aperture); changes and additions on your Mac are instantly visible on your console.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This week only, DF readers can save 25 percent with coupon code &amp;#8220;DARINGFIRE2010&amp;#8221;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Rivet’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/26/rivet"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I love this whole unfolding future-of-Flash saga because it&amp;#8217;s a wonderful mix of politics and technology. It&amp;#8217;s complex and multivariate, but not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; complex to get a handle on the basic gist. It occurred to me this week, after both reading and writing quite a bit regarding Flash Player&amp;#8217;s performance issues, that the whole performance angle is a distraction from the fundamental issues at hand.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/01/z"&gt;linked&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href="http://www.zeldman.com/2010/02/01/flash-ipad-standards/"&gt;this piece by Jeffrey Zeldman&lt;/a&gt; three weeks ago, but it&amp;#8217;s worth a re-link. His first paragraph nails it:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to &lt;em&gt;build the semantic HTML layer first&lt;/em&gt;. Additional &lt;a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/semanticflash/"&gt;layers of Flash UX&lt;/a&gt; can then be optionally added in, just as, in proper, accessible, standards-based development, &lt;a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/behavioralseparation"&gt;JavaScript UX enhancements&lt;/a&gt; are added only after we verify that the site works without them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you &lt;em&gt;don&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you&amp;#8217;re probably wrong.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Flash&amp;#8217;s performance problems on Mac OS X and mobile devices are very much real. (As of today, note that there still is no shipping version of the full Flash Player for any major mobile platform.) And I do think these performance issues are a factor in Apple&amp;#8217;s decision not to include it in iPhone OS. But I believe the larger issue goes beyond performance. Apple sees the web as a platform based on open standards. Flash isn&amp;#8217;t part of that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So at the moment, Flash&amp;#8217;s performance issues provide Apple with a good apolitical explanation for why Flash Player isn&amp;#8217;t included with iPhone OS. It&amp;#8217;s a way for Apple to argue that they &lt;em&gt;can&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt; rather than that they &lt;em&gt;won&amp;#8217;t&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Yes, I&amp;#8217;m skeptical about how Flash Player is going to perform on Android and WebOS devices. I hope I&amp;#8217;m wrong though. If Adobe&amp;#8217;s able to squeeze acceptable performance out of Flash Player 10.1 on these (relatively) low-power ARM devices, then it&amp;#8217;s very likely that Flash Player 10.1 for Mac OS X is going to be much improved as well. (In the same way how the constraints imposed on iPhone OS have been great for Mac OS X &amp;#8212; performance tweaks to components like WebKit (and especially JavaScriptCore) made to get MobileSafari running as fast as possible on low-power iPhones have resulted in fantastic performance improvements to WebKit on high-power Macs.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s what I mean about Flash Player&amp;#8217;s performance being a distraction from the underlying story: Even if Adobe solves Flash&amp;#8217;s performance problems, I still doubt Apple will want to include it in iPhone OS.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It boils down to control. I&amp;#8217;ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There&amp;#8217;s no bug Apple can&amp;#8217;t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can&amp;#8217;t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for. That&amp;#8217;s just not true for Mac OS X, where a component like Flash Player is controlled by Adobe.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I know there are some people who see Apple taking a stand against Flash and &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/9664056169"&gt;worry&lt;/a&gt; that Apple may someday take a stand against the web itself. One thing that everyone who&amp;#8217;s paying attention can agree on is that Apple greatly values control. That&amp;#8217;s indisputable, regardless if you consider it a virtue or vice. So I think the worriers see that the web is beyond anyone&amp;#8217;s control and conclude that Apple sees it as a threat.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I say what Apple cares about controlling is the &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt;. That&amp;#8217;s why they started the WebKit project. That&amp;#8217;s why Apple employees from the WebKit team are leaders and major contributors of the HTML5 standards drive. The bottom line for Apple, at the executive level, is selling devices. It may well be true that Steve Jobs doesn&amp;#8217;t really give a shit about the web in and of itself. It&amp;#8217;s just good business for Apple to control a best-of-breed web rendering engine. If Apple controls its own implementation, then no matter how popular the web gets as a platform, Apple will prosper so long as its implementation is superior. (Needless to say, Apple is &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/"&gt;quite confident&lt;/a&gt; in this regard.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The weird thing about a completely open platform based on open standards is that while no single vendor, such as Apple, can control the content or the standards, it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; control its implementation. (And it can &lt;em&gt;influence&lt;/em&gt; the content and the standards.) That&amp;#8217;s all they need.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Likewise with Google&amp;#8217;s interest in the open web and HTML5. It&amp;#8217;s reasonable to be cynical and believe that Google is concerned only with making money, not with the open web simply for virtue&amp;#8217;s sake. So long as the web is open, Google&amp;#8217;s success rests within its own control. And in the same way Apple is confident in its ability to deliver devices with best-of-breed browsing experiences, Google is confident in its ability to provide best-of-breed search results and relevant ads. In short, Google and Apple have found different ways to bet &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the web, rather than &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the web.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The best counter-argument is perhaps that, given Apple&amp;#8217;s desire for control, they&amp;#8217;re always going to prefer their wholly owned proprietary platforms &amp;#8212; native iPhone and Mac apps &amp;#8212; over the web, and will eventually come to see the web as a threat. I don&amp;#8217;t think Apple sees it that way, though. There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it&amp;#8217;s the web. Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t build lowest common denominator platforms. Before, when Windows was the LCD, Apple was in a hard place because they were locked out of that platform: their platform was at odds with it. Now, with the web as the LCD, Apple has it both ways: their platforms gracefully coexist with it. Apple isn&amp;#8217;t a web company, but the web might be the best thing that ever happened to them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;From Apple&amp;#8217;s perspective, when it comes to software platforms, &lt;em&gt;theirs&lt;/em&gt; is best (Cocoa/Cocoa Touch), because they have complete control. &lt;em&gt;Everyone&amp;#8217;s&lt;/em&gt; is good (the web), because Apple has control over their own implementation and can influence the future direction of the standards. What Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t want is &lt;em&gt;someone else&amp;#8217;s&lt;/em&gt; proprietary platform, where they have no control at all. That&amp;#8217;s what Flash is.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ve said this &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus"&gt;before&lt;/a&gt; and will say it again. There&amp;#8217;s only one path for Flash Player to make its way to iPhone OS:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;It appears first on other competing mobile platforms.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;It works well on those platforms.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Its presence and popularity on those competing platforms shifts consumer demand and adversely affects iPhone OS device sales.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;#1 will happen. Regarding #2, I&amp;#8217;m skeptical, but Adobe has smart engineers and their back is to the wall. #3, though, would require a major shift in momentum.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;An animated appraisal from Steven Heller.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/26/pictograms"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Terrific interview with Jim Reekes, creator of the Mac startup sound. Starts out in Dutch, but the interview is in English. (&lt;a href="http://www.uiandus.com/blog/2010/2/12/creator-of-the-mac-startup-sound.html"&gt;Via Keith Lang&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; One More Thing&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkTwNerh1G8"&gt;complete one-hour interview with Reekes&lt;/a&gt; is now on YouTube.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Let It Beep&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/26/reekes"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I was there the week after Macworld Expo. Crystals (the high-end shopping mall) is a disaster inside; it feels like a maze. Aria is nice; its casino has an intriguing modern decor. Vdara seemed like a billion-dollar empty tower. CityCenter as a whole strikes me as a fundamentally bad idea &amp;#8212; a massive complex in Vegas that doesn&amp;#8217;t feel one bit like Vegas.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Lamster, attending the grand opening for architecture critics:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The absurdity of CityCenter’s urban gesture of separating its buildings now becomes apparent. The PR team has arranged for SUVs to take journalists from the Aria to the Mandarin Oriental for a cocktail party. The buildings are maybe 150 feet from each other.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href="http://kottke.org/10/02/post-metaphor-las-vegas"&gt;Via Kottke&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mark Lamster on Las Vegas&amp;#8217;s CityCenter’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/26/lamster-citycenter"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jeff LaMarche on the Nexus One:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;To make matters worse, the sensors on the Nexus One for the four hardware buttons are not exactly aligned with the silkscreened icons. You have to tap noticeably above the button to get it to register. That was very frustrating for me until someone (from Google nonetheless) pointed out the mis-alignment. Up until then, I consistently had to hit the buttons three or four times to get it to register.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But even worse than that, the home button on the Nexus One is &lt;em&gt;right below the fracking space bar on the portrait keyboard&lt;/em&gt;. Combine that with the not-completely-precise touch screen, and you have a UX disaster. I can&amp;#8217;t tell you how many times I&amp;#8217;ve been typing and ended up leaving my application due to accidentally hitting the home button. Leaving an application mid-sentence is hardly a good user experience.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;He&amp;#8217;s got lots of other observations I agree with, but the above one is, without question, the biggest WTF on the Nexus One. It&amp;#8217;s just bizarre.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Nexus One From an iPhone Developer&amp;#8217;s Perspective’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/26/nexus-one"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

Filed under: iPad

Business Insider's The Wire is reporting, rather humorously, that AP sources have the scoop that the Associated Press is working on its own iPad app. It will reportedly be a paid subscription news app that generates content from the AP and more than 1,000 member newspapers and broadcasters.

The AP follows the New York Times and other news sources that are developing applications for the iPad. While the AP doesn't say if the app would be available for the iPad launch late next month, the hope is that its eventual release will generate sales from the three million people who have downloaded their free iPhone app and would be willing to pay for the apps features on a larger-screen device. To get users interested in the app, it may be free upon initial launch.

From the official press release:

The group already has drawn up plans to charge for an application designed for the iPad, a 1.5-pound tablet computer that Apple Inc. is scheduled to release at the end of March. The price of the application has yet to be determined, although it might start free, according to Jane Seagrave, a senior vice president who becomes the AP's chief revenue officer Monday.

Much like the AP Mobile news product, the iPad app will show custom packages of headlines, stories, photos and video from the AP and from newspapers and broadcasters that choose to contribute their content and share the revenue. AP members also could use the same system to offer their own iPad apps that show their own content.

The AP iPad app is just the first product from the AP's new business unit known as "AP Gateway" that will focus on mobile platforms. The AP is among the legion of print-centric news organizations that have seen revenue hit hard by free papers and the internet. A week ago, a Dutch paper made the case that devices like the iPad are the newspaper industry's only hope for paid distribution. While many still debate whether the iPad is the savior the publishing industry needs, it's clear that the major publishers are gearing up for an iPad world.

TUAWAssociated Press sources report Associated Press working on iPad app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/briefly2602.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Details of the upcoming DevDay for iPhone taking place in London, England have been set. The meeting will happen on April 26th at Dexter House, and offer presentations from Raven Zachary and Daniel Steinberg. The conference is meant for software developers and business professionals aiming to learn not only how to build iPhone apps, but also how to market them. Anyone wanting to attend can find addition information and registration details online. A pass costs $545, and includes conference materials plus access to presentations, workshops, and an evening networking e...

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Steve Jobs, Apple

Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog has some unofficial minutes from this week's Apple shareholder meeting -- while press weren't actually allowed inside the event (which featured Apple's board, including Al Gore, Steve Jobs, and new co-lead director Andrea Jung), that didn't stop an anonymous shareholder from revealing the goings-on. Not that it mattered much -- the whole affair sounds pretty boring, with Apple running down what they've done in public over the past year, along with lots of formalities and shareholder votes.

One highlight is that Steve Jobs sounds like he's got the magic back -- apparently he was "feisty" during the Q&A session, and he sounds like he's back to work, saying that Apple is holding onto their piles of cash for some "big, bold moves." There was news that Apple is planning to expand their retail presence in China, opening up 25 Apple Stores over there over the next two years. Both a stock split and a sustainability proposal were brought up, discussed, and turned down by the shareholders (more on the stock split here on TUAW in just a bit).

In short, Apple is a company, just like any other. It's actually fun to see behind the doors on this one, and get a look at the mechanics that drive this historic company. You almost get a sense of what Jobs is like in actual meetings -- fairly demanding, always pushing for answers (or questions), and while opinionated, always fair (Eric Schmidt was brought up, and Jobs said that the Google VIP "conducted himself appropriately" while at Apple). Despite the fact that those two proposals were declined, it sounds like a productive meeting.

TUAWMinutes from Apple's shareholder meeting originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/dellstreak-leak.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />New information about the Mini 5 tablet/smartphone from Dell has been revealed on Friday thanks to a comprehensive interview. Speaking to Laptop in a Thursday article, Neeraj Choubey, the general manager of tablets in Dellís Communications Solutions Group, said the company is working with AT&T on offering the Mini 5 to customers. Choubey also revealed users will have access to the Android Market, just like a more conventional Android-powered smarpthone....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/joojoo.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Fusion Garage on Friday afternoon said it has had to delay shipping the JooJoo tablet by nearly a month, to March 25th. It promised the February target as recently as this month but now says it had to improve the sensitivity of the 12-inch touchscreen before shipping the web device. Those who pre-ordered the tablet will get a free but unnamed accessory in exchange for the delay....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/ipad-3.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />The Associated Press has announced plans for the iPad, which entail a custom application attached to a paid subscription service. Although the newswire agency already syndicates most of its content, the iPad app will also include content from over 1,000 newspapers and broadcasters, in keeping with the company's current cellphone efforts. No prices or release dates have been mentioned....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/cash.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />The winner of Apple's recent iTunes contest, Louie Sulcer, initially dismissed Steve Jobs' personal phone call as a prank, according to Rolling Stone. Sulcer claims to have purchased the 10 billionth iTunes track, Johnny Cash's "Guess Things Happen That Way," while unaware that Apple was running such a promotion....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1001/entourageedge-ces.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />More information has been gleaned about the Entourage eDGe we had a chance to play with at CES thanks to an interview with the company's President and CEO as well as the VP of Marketing. Speaking to E-ReaderInfo, President Asghar Mostafa and Doug Atkinson have revealed that their device, which has both an E-Ink screen and a traditional LCD, has a 16-hour battery life when operating with the paper screen itself....

<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/amazonkindledx-sm.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Amazon has been hounding book publishers into signing deals that would prevent them from selling iPad books at below Kindle e-book prices, a set of rumors from within the industry claim. Having anticipated an Apple tablet since December, the online reseller has reportedly been trying to negotiate "most favored nation" details that would guarantee that no competitor would get a better price. The larger cut of royalties promised last month is now said to have been intended as an incentive to sign these deals....

Filed under: How-tos, Tips and tricks, Apple TV

After many years together, my Linksys WRT54G and I have parted ways. In its place, I'm now using an 802.11g-based Apple AirPort Express with AirTunes that was passed along to me. Besides not wanting to fork out the extra beans (c'mon, who here isn't saving up money for an iPad) for a shiny new 802.11n Airport Express, the devices living in my current wireless ecosystem are more g-leaning. That, and I don't really need the speed of 802.11n or the ethernet cable connection afforded to me by the WRT54G.

Or so I thought.

I had just restored my Apple TV to factory settings when I realized that I'd have to transfer 20GB of videos back to it from my MacBook Pro. Waiting for paint to dry would be more fun than waiting for all 20GBs to transfer using the AirPort Express's 802.11g connection. Or, for old times' sake, I could bring the WRT54G out of temporary retirement and connect the two together. But I didn't want to do that.

However, as all modern ethernet-equipped Apple products are of the gigabit ethernet spec, I could just plug an ethernet cable directly between the two and party like it's 1999. And if this was 1999, I wouldn't be able to do this without a crossover ethernet cable. Update: As pointed out in the comments, the Apple TV actually doesn't have a gigabit port -- it's a 10/100 connection -- but both the Mac and ATV ports support auto-sensing, which removes the requirement of the crossover cable when connecting the two devices.

To begin, you may want turn off the AirPort connection on your Mac to avoid any network device priority issues. After connecting your Mac directly to your Apple TV, head on over to "Settings" on your Apple TV and select "Network." Then, hop on over to "Configure Ethernet" and select "Use DHCP." Voila! You may now sync to your heart's content.

Neat trick if you need to transfer a lot of files fast. Of course, it'll use the port up on both computers, and you won't have the use of your internet connection during the transfer, but for a quick share, it's the easiest way to do things.

TUAWDirectly connecting and syncing content between your Mac and Apple TV originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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<img align='left' src='http://photos.macnn.com/news/1002/intelcorei7mobile.jpg' border='0' width='176' height='120' />Three speed upgrades for Intel's Core i7 chips have been leaked within the past several hours that show the company planning a slew of speed upgrades in coming weeks for both desktops and mobiles. A store listing for the Core i7-980X appears to provide additional details beyond past leaks and suggests Intel's first mainstream six-core processor will be even faster than expected. While it's already known to run at 3.33GHz with all six cores and carry 12MB of cache, the chip is now set to use Turbo Boost to ramp up to 3.6GHz and in Germany should cost the equivalent...

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about whether to buy a 27" iMac or a MacBook Pro, increasing the number of iPhone home screens, moving your home folder to an external disk, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.

Bayuze asks

I have a iPhone 3G 8GB. There are 11 home screens on my device now and I noticed that when I install new apps they don't appear anywhere and are only available if I search for them. How can I rectify this? Does this mean that 11 is the maximum number of home screens?

You are correct that the default maximum for iPhone home screens is 11, though additional apps can be accessed by searching. It turns out that there is a hack that may allow you to access more than 11 home screens. However, this appears to be unreliable and is probably not the kind of thing one should depend on. If you really consistently want more than 11 home screens I think you'll have to jailbreak your phone.

Joe asks

My 27" iMac's hard drive is slow. I've decided to replace it with an SSD. OS X, applications and my Aperture Library are the only things that will live on the SSD. Everything else, which is just my user's home folder, will live on a FW800 external drive.My question is this: When I get the SSD and install a fresh copy of Snow Leopard, do I create a new user with the same name as my current user then point that account to the external drive or will SL see the user account that's already on the external drive? What's important in the Advanced Options for a user account -- i.e. should I note the User ID, Group ID, Short Name, Login Shell, and UUID of my current user and replicate that with the new install?

As it turns out, our own Robert Palmer discussed moving a home folder last year. It certainly can't hurt to note all of those things you mention (the easiest thing to do is just take a screenshot), but all you really should have to do is change the home folder location in the Advanced Options. Although I get the sense you're already aware of this, for everyone else you can get to these options simply by right-clicking on the account name in the Accounts Preference Pane. This will allow you to select the location of your home folder just by navigating to the external drive with the standard Open file sheet. Do keep in mind Robert's warning that "in the past, some security and software updates have been confused by the fact that a user's home folder isn't on the startup disk."

amiga_tone asks

I don't get the whole 3G/WiFi version of the iPad. If the device comes with BlueTooth and iPhone tethering (in general) is supported in your country then the only point of selling a 3G compatible iPad is if you don't own a mobile phone. Based on this why would you own an iPad but not a mobile phone?... If they offer no 3G tethering here in Australia then you have to pay 2 monthly service fees (iPhone and iPad) and have 2 separate caps. If tethering is allowed then you will only have to pay 1 monthly service fee but share you data cap across 2 devices - though you would be more inclined to use the iPad for data access than your iPhone - or would you?

This isn't really a technical question, but I would point out a couple of things. There are lots of people who purchase USB cell modems (or MiFi devices) even though they already have mobile phones. Furthermore, in the US, AT&T still hasn't gotten around to allowing tethering on the iPhone officially, so you're out of luck if you live in the States anyway. Finally, the pricing difference really seals the deal. Again in the US, the standard tethering price for smartphones is $60/month. So if you think about it, the additional price of the 3G iPad will be made up in only a little more than four months given the much lower monthly data charge of $30/month. Given the pricing model (and lack of contract), plus the convenience of not having to set up the tether, I think the 3G iPad is definitely worth it if you're ever going to use it outside of a Wi-Fi hotspot. And I'll put my money where my mouth is once it's released.

jakejohnson asks

I want to purchase a new 27" iMac with the i7 processor. However, the reports of DOA units and yellow screens on various forums has me worried. I have decided to pull the trigger and buy one in the next couple of weeks, UNLESS(!) there is reason to believe that the iMacs will receive a small spec bump in the coming months. A slightly more powerful i7 chip as well as the addition of an eSATA port and SSD options have been rumors. Do I have any reason to believe that any of these rumored rumors might have some truth to them, and that I might see any one of them happening in the first half of this year?

As always with Apple products, you can't really act on the basis of rumors. There's obviously no guarantee that any of those features will be included in the next revision. That said, the MacRumors iMac Buyer's Guide is a handy resource for the time since the last update. You can see that the present model is only about half-way through the normal iMac product cycle, so if you choose to wait for a new model you're likely to be waiting several months (and it may still not have those features you mention).

As regard the potential problems with the 27" iMac, particularly the yellow screen issue, a good place to look is over at Gizmodo where they've been keeping track of the problems. Their recommendation at this time is that it's safe to buy a 27" iMac, but that you should run this lcd test when you get it and return it for exchange if there's a problem.

sinX asks

Will the ipad be able to use that NetShare app that was on the app store for a bit to connect through?

Well, obviously we won't know for sure until the iPad is released, but I rather doubt it. According to this NetShare setup guide you have to create a Computer-to-Computer network for this to work. It seems unlikely to me that the iPad will be able to do that, and if so, it seems unlikely that it will work with NetShare. If you're willing to jailbreak (along with all that entails) I suspect that the iPad will be able to connect though MyWi ($10).

Jay asks

My MacBook Pro is getting pretty old (bought it with the first wave of MBPs back in law school - still running Tiger) so I'm considering upgrading to a fancy new model sometime soon. Seeing as how there haven't been any MBP refreshes lately, should I wait a little longer until they push out some new models? How long do you think I'll be waiting? I'm all for instant gratification, but if waiting an extra three to four weeks means a much better computer for the same amount of dough, I'm willing to put up with my current laptop for the time being. What say you, TUAW?

As with the last question, you can't guarantee anything with product refreshes. However, the MacRumors Guide for the MacBook Pro suggests that an update is really due. PC manufacturers are starting to put out Core i5 and i7 laptops, which is making the MacBook Pro line look increasingly dated. Part of the problem seems to be an issue with the graphics chipset, because of a licensing squabble between Nvidia and Intel. In short, in your shoes I would definitely wait for a few weeks because the performance improvements on the Core i7 will very likely be significant.

sn0man1 asks

I love the idea of the 'find my iPhone' for mobileme but was wondering if there was a 'find my MacBook' feature as well? I recently had my MacBook stolen and replaced it, but would like to be prepared if it happens again.

It wouldn't really be feasible for Apple to implement this, at least in the same way, because the MacBook lacks a GPS component. That said, there are third-party laptop recovery applications out there that do offer some similar protection by getting general location data through Wi-Fi or IP addresses. Check out our recent post on hidden for more information on one such service (and links to others). I should point out, though, that even Back to My Mac has helped recover a stolen MacBook.

TUAWAsk TUAW: Shopping for new Macs, iPhone home screens, home folder on external disk, and more originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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