http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

[source: randomgoodstuff]

I can imagine getting lost in the rain while walking is a scenario we’ve all been in numerous times and this is the gadget we’ve been waiting for.

My only question- how usable is this? I like the idea of watching people walk down the street  staring up into their umbrella watching CNN or the lastest episode of Family Guy and running into people.

Looks to me like a great (yet annoying to consumers) way to advertise.

Would you buy it?

If you managed to miss this somehow:

http://www.adobe.com/creativelicense/

Go ahead and Preorder today, but I don’t think they’ve made any promises about when it will actually arrive yet. I’d hope it will show up before Flashbelt.

They have gone as far as telling me my plan to upgrade a copy of Flash 5 that I bought off a guy for $40 on Craigslist and planned to upgrade to Flash CS3 will not work.

Personally I’m most intrigued by a new flash feature that attempts to make the designer to developer workflow easier by allowing us to export tweened animation in Flash as Actionscript code…

Then on Monday, Sun announced Project Blackbox – a datacenter within a shipping container.

I smell a pretty cool mashup.

(full disclosure: yes, I’ve been doing work for Sun – no, I had no idea about this.)

“Minneapolis, out in a sea of corn and soybeans, has not yet been given its proper recognition as a tech capital.”

Damn straight.

“I think we could create a slice of Silicon Valley here in the Twin Cities, but we first have to want it, not just wish for it.” – Robert Metcalf, Flyspy.com

in a great interview by Graeme Thickens.

The idea that giving ideas away for free was in some way detrimental to business success. That in fact, sharing is worse than not.

My problem with that perspective is that I also believe:

“…value is in creating the thing, not simply having the idea.” – Brad Feld

It doesn’t matter how many ideas for cool applications and tools I have (there’s a lot) if I don’t launch them. Even if I did launch them, they might not be launched in a way that makes sense for your situation.

This is the benefit of open source projects. When they launch, they solve a specific problem that one group of people have. By making the application freely available, the ideas within it influence the derivations (making the original application more valuable). Otherwise, you’re demanding the rest of the world to reinvent the wheel – just to solve a slightly different problem. That seems pretty snotty.

For comparison, TadaList & Sproutliner.

TadaList is a tiered-access hosted browser-based to do list application by 37Signals.
Sproutliner is an open source, install yourself browser-based to do list application.

Basically the same idea (browser-based to do lists) built by 2 different groups of people to meet the needs of 2 different audiences.

Can you put the Apple iPod deal into perspective?

It is part of our overall digital strategy, something Bob Wright had laid out for us for more than a year now, which is to make our content as ubiquitous as possible, to have it be available on as many screens as possible. We want it to be on all the platforms.

Will TV as we know it die? How will TIVO and it’s brethren fair when all media is downloadable (legally) via the web?

I imagine there is going to be years of shakedown between these media formats. In the end, consumers will win, but there will be lots of victims in the process. I feel on demand, content when you want it– is going to win vs. hard copy (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, TIVO).

*****
This just in…

According to this www.ilounge.com article. We may be seeing HBO joining the fray.

Jen’s reaction: “What would you plug in?…your printer? What you going to print?”

That’s probably why..nothing to print.

I’ve even started using it around the house – specifically with the Tivoli iPal.

This means, I can go from the house to the car to the house not miss a beat – just like an actual radio station. Hmmm. MPR, JackFM, Cities97 are you listening? With 5,585 tracks in my iTunes Library, I’m confident I have “…More Variety”.

Anyway, here’s the odd mental shift. With the iTrip, my iPod is basically a remote control to the nearest radio w/ speakers telling the speakers – whether in the car or the Tivoli – what to play. Just like the other remote controls around the house. The difference, the remote controls for the DVD and TV don’t contain the audio or video – the iPod does.

This is a whole different kind of remote control. Play, Fast Forward, Rewind, Pause are extremely blunt, primitive commands. The iPod says – play this, then this, then this.

It’s as if the DVD remote control contained the DVD and with the new video iPod, it’s exactly that.