Top stories

Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

Dustup Over Flash Coming to iPhone Via QuickTime Should be Word to Apple

flvplaybackonqt.png

Are you ready to see this on your iPhone?

The Apple blogosphere percolated with spitting and popping yesterday after Daring Fireball reported that iPhone and iPod Touch users might find reasons to be excited about the impending release of QuickTime X in Snow Leopard.

The possibility of native .flv file support in QuickTime X meant that support for Flash video – probably the biggest item remaining on many people’s wish-list for iPhone – could soon be a reality for Apple’s mobile device users. The story was picked up by TechCrunch and we were off to the races.

Turns out to have been a false alarm, triggered by an over-eager post at Cateto blog, occasioned by a bit of software confusion, but still

The point here is that with Perian, a free open source plug-in for QuickTime, Flash on the iPhone and iPod Touch would be conceivable, no matter the difficulty of Apple and Adobe executives and legal departments finding a way to get on the same page about it all.

Just one more reason why we lurve open source.

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer, musician, web designer attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

Email the author | Read more posts by Lonnie Lazar.

5 comments

    I think flash video isn’t much of a problem, after all if a video provider wants to service iphone users, an investment in batch conversion is enough. The biggest issue on flash on the iphone is not video, but apps. Apple wanted (quite astutely), to keep the rules of the game in a field it can control completely. Leaving the possibility to execute flash apps on the iphone (natively or inside a browser) would be like handing over a slice of the control of the platform to adobe. This would be bad for many reasons, and not only financial ones. One of the biggest concerns Apple had about the sdk at the beginning was the performance and security (… you install a game and the phone doesn’t work anymore…), so I think – considering the somewhat mixed record of flash executables in these two areas – that flash apps on the iphone will remain imaginary for a long time.

    Making it happen isn’t a problem. The problem is that flash performance sucks. Despite what the guys on Macbreak Weekly say, browser crashes (in my case anyway) are almost always from flash running in the browser, not javascript. And flash is slow. Ever go to a web page, have everything hang a few seconds, and then something loads in flash? Yeah.

    I believe Apple when they say they haven’t put it on there yet because it’s a performance pig.

    I think Safari in iPhone OS 3.0 supports HTML 5 and its video tags. Hopefully that will wipe out the need for flash:

    http://tech.yahoo.com/news/infoworld/20090616/tc_infoworld/79291

    I’ve actually been finding the iPhone web a better experience than a normal computer’s web because of the lack of flash. Everything is just cleaner and simpler to access information.

    More importantly, is that really a screen shot from the Club Nokia Prince gig in LA! I was there for all 3 shows and have the show’s in audio bootleg, but not video – please reveal the source!! Oh, and playing flv files in quicktime would be lovely on my iPhone!

    Um, f— flash.
    =\

Add your comment

Name(Required)

Mail (required, but not published)

Website

Comment

Buy Inside Steve's Brain Buy from Amazon.com Buy from Barnes & Noble