True, yet people are not clamoring for those flash applications. Dan's example of luxury brands' web sites is a good one, but that's not what people want.

People want Hulu, and the games over in the Timewasters thread, and other things, that require either Flash or HTML5 (or something beyond what Ajax can do).

Note that I'm not defending Flash; I still think it largely sucks. I'd rather see it disappear in favor of HTML5. And it will, eventually, as HTML5 support becomes ubiquitous on the desktop.

I think Apple's licensing terms are ridiculous, punitive, and overreaching. I think they deserve to be excoriated for it. Adobe also deserves to be excoriated for failing to make Flash consume huge amounts of memory for even the most trivial task, not opening the standard before they did and not opening it as much as it should be even now, and not being bothered to develop a mobile Flash until now.


No, it's not. If Apple doesn't want to allow direct access to private APIs, make them private. It should be easy enough to automate a tool to detect unauthorized access to those functions in a binary, and reject them if they do. That's perfectly reasonable. There are far more logical ways to do what Apple is claiming they want to do, but they don't want to do that. They want to block Flash. That guy is probably correct that they're far from sad about disabling the other cross-platform tools. But they didn't mind about them until Adobe was on the verge of releasing their tools.

You know what, though? I really don't care. I don't have an iPhone, nor am I likely to get one or develop for it. It's your inaccurate and relativist arguments that irritate me. I guarantee you that if Google had decided the exact same thing, you would claim that it was the worst possible move they could make and that it would destroy the company. In addition, I don't care about Apple's motivations. I care that it limits competition and innovation, and your apologia for it is equally as morally bankrupt.