Yeah, that’s me calling the kettle black, but this is a great case in point.ADHERER

Check out this article… http://www.minyanville.com/articles/print.php?a=27205

I don’t know a thing about Michael Comeau, the author of this piece, except that he doesn’t know his rear from a hole in the ground.  It may be best to read this article from the bottom up, just to see my point.

Toward the bottom of the post, Mr. Comeau states that he predicts that Aperture 4 will have more robust photo editing features.  That, in itself, would be cause to write about.  I mean, if he has this information, then why not share it?

But he takes his prediction as golden truth and extends his belief to say that, since Aperture 4 will be invading the more-expensive Photoshop’s realm, well then Apple will be looking to squash Photoshop.  Does this make any sense?  Why not just say, “hey, our stuff is better and cheaper.  Try it before you fork over $700 large on Photoshop.”  Instead, Mr. Comeau thinks that this is pitting Apple against Adobe in a Battle Royale.

Does he stop there?  Oh no, he doesn’t!  Mr. Comeau then goes further into Apple’s apparent huge problem with Flash.  Now, Flash, which has naught to do with Photoshop, isn’t on the iPhone and is now-famously absent from the forthcoming iPad.  Mr. Comeau posits that Apple is quelling Flash because they want to kill Adobe to make room for Aperture.

Does anyone seriously believe this sort of predatory practice might be taking place?  Okay, dumb question… but does this seem likely?  I mean, he has Apple saying, “Okay, we have this product… and we MIGHT want to add functionality that would have it compete with another company’s far-more-expensive product, so let’s attack this company’s other products to get them that way!”  Why not attack the Gimps and Paint.nets of the world?

If anyone needs more proof of Mr. Comeau’s lack of sanity, he calls HTML 5 “open source.”  Since when is a language open source?  Programs have source code, written in languages, and if a programmer allows his source to be freely available, then that is what’s called “open source.”  But calling HTML 5 open source is like saying C++ is open source.

No!  Web pages are written in HTML, which may be HTML 5 compliant (that is, it utilizes tags that were added in the HTML 5 spec).  The HTML source of a webpage is freely viewable, but that doesn’t make that HTML open source.  And it certainly doesn’t make HTML 5, the specification, open source.  Does he think that since HTML 5 is a standard, so it’s not kept a guarded secret, that it’s open source?

In the end, Flash is full of security holes… more so than any other software platform/application out there.  Yep, it’s more full of holes than Internet Explorer now.  And Flash is a dangerous platform to begin with.  Imagine loading a website thinking that you’re watching a video or playing a game, but unbeknownst to you there’s malware being installed in the background.

Flash is used most commonly for games and streaming video.  Well, HTML 5 is building in a streaming video tag, which is far more safe.  So now you’ll be depending on code running in Firefox or Chrome to render the video rather than code coming off the website itself.

Mr. Comeau believes that this sort of thing is impossible on the iPhone or iPad.  To that I would say he should probably get an iPhone first and see that it is capable of playing many forms of streaming video as well as YouTube natively.  Mr. Comeau also believes that the only way to get audio or video onto the iPhone is via iTunes, but I think we can safely see that anything that Flash would give an iPhone user in the video department is very possible.  I have never felt at a loss for not having Flash on my iPhone.

As for Flash games, well, why not create downloadable games?  Honestly, if I were a Flash game developer, I would rather go this route.  Why?  Well, I’ll tell you.  First of all, a downloadable game doesn’t need a 24×7 server available for people to play the game.  And what’s the appeal of being a Flash-based game developer?  I would imagine the ads?  Well, where do most people block ads?  That’s right, in their browsers.  So, if the ads are presented in a downloadable game, then they are much less likely to be blocked.

In the end, I just loved this comment by Mr. Comeau: “…Apple software ain’t running on Windows — no way, no how.”  Obviously he’s never seen Quicktime or iTunes, both of which have Windows versions.

So, after all this, Mr. Comeau guessed at some forthcoming functionality in Aperture 4 and extruded this all the way to why there’s no Flash on the iPhone or iPad.  That’s a non-sequitur in my book.

In the end, I would have left a comment on Mr. Comeau’s blog, but he doesn’t have that capability.  And I can see why.  If I wrote things that were so patently wrong, I wouldn’t want anyone to be able to comment either.  But, since apparently anyone can blog, I decided to vent my frustrations on my own blog.

I look forward to your comments below…