Apple, Why Won’t You Let Us Be Great?
I saw the Sport Illustrated demo video long before the iPad was released. It was everything the iPad should have been on Day One. A mind blowing demonstration of what the future of the magazine could be.
The problem is, the iPad cannot currently do what the demo presents, and it should, right now. Flash is the only current technology that would make that possible.
Apple is betting on HTML5 as the method for developing iPad content. However, HTML5 isn’t ready to provide the tools to provide rich interactive applications, like a virtual Sports Illustrated magazine. Apple won’t allow brilliant content creators to be creative because they have failed to at least provide the option to use Flash on the device. This has nothing to do with the iPad designed as something other than a normal computer, it has everything to do with it needing to be a one stop-and-shop piece of entertainment technology. It simply can’t because Apple won’t support the authoring tools required
Steve Jobs blames Adobe for why he won’t adopt Flash.
“They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, the world is moving to HTML5.”
The problem, Steve, is that HTML5, the next iteration of HTML, is not ready for prime time yet and won’t be for many years. Standards take decades to be adopted and there currently aren’t any authoring tools for HTML5 that allow us to develop the same rich interactive content that Flash provides.
Apple has always prided themselves on design noted for what it leaves out, allowing devices to focus on the task they were meant for. However, Apple seemingly has no good strategy for content creators to build what Flash provides.
The reason why the publishing world, particularly newspaper and magazine people, were disappointed with the initial presentation of iPad, was because the focus of the device should have been a game changing way to present their content. Initially, I blamed the publishers, but soon realized, Apple isn’t providing any means to create this content. Leading up to the release, it seems they didn’t bother to work with content creators, so Apple could truly come out of the gate showing people the potential the iPad has to change the media landscape.
Apple should have worked with these content providers to have demonstrations of content that is heavy on video and interactive infographics. Smarter designers, developers, and writers could have created content that would have us all drooling over getting our hands on this device. Instead we were left wondering, what happened?
Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
