Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos…

You know, confusing hardware (flash memory) with software (Adobe Flash) like this is the kind of mistake one might expect minimum-waged electronics sales staff to make — not someone writing tech columns for Dow Jones Newswires that get picked up by money.cnn.com…

(Via Daring Fireball, of course.)

Moody said that YouTube will soon be encoding videos in the H.264 streaming-efficient compression format preferred by Apple TV, and that all new videos submitted to YouTube as of the mid-June launch of the AppleTV update will be playable by the device. From then until fall, YouTube will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format, adding videos in chunks until everything is accessible to Apple TV users.

YouTube currently uses Flash (.flv) format for its videos, which has the advantage of a large installed base. But the older version of the Flash plug-in used by YouTube (Flash MX, aka version 7, which uses the Sorenson Spark H.263 codec) doesn’t offer very good quality.

Given Eric Schmidt’s position on Apple’s Board of Directors, it’s not hard to view this as

1. Google protecting itself against relying solely on Adobe’s product and diversifying to include Apple’s QuickTime (since all Mac OS X users and all iTunes users have QuickTime, it also has a very large installed base) — but not necessarily supplanting Flash with QuickTime.
2. Google wanting to improve the YouTube brand by improving video quality
3. Google wanting to solidify its position as market leader by gaining access to the AppleTV audience (which will not be the same audience it has now; the living room is not the desktop)
4. Google paving the way to connect the iPhone (which will have Google Maps built-in) with YouTube?
]]> http://chris.tantramar.com/2007/06/02/youtube-videos-in-h264-for-appletv-ipod-iphone/feed/ 0 http://chris.tantramar.com/2007/04/17/as-long-as-im-abusing-adobe/ http://chris.tantramar.com/2007/04/17/as-long-as-im-abusing-adobe/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:43:50 +0000 Chris http://chris.tantramar.com/?p=136 There seems to be a theme today…

What is it with Adobe.com? I tell it to remember me as a registered user, and it never does. It’s not as if cookies aren’t set — it shows “welcome, ” and then my account ID. It knows me. But if I click on “Your Account”, it asks me to sign in. How stupid is that? It wastes my time, every time. They’re important, and I’m not. Not a great way to treat customers.

Normally, the way these things work, is that once you log-in to a site, you can close the window and come back later without having to log in again — as long as you don’t quit the browser. Not with Adobe.com. It forgets every time.

And what’s up with those horrid drop-down menus? Are they trying to trigger an epileptic seizure?

Of course, this is how it works in Safari on Mac OS X. No doubt it works just fine in Firefox, or IE7, or IE6, or some other browser I don’t use (when not testing web sites). But Adobe ships their products for Mac OS X, and their web site should work in the default web browser for Mac OS X. Period. It’s not as if their site navigation is some minor feature on their site…

That’s enough ranting for today. Stay tuned for a look at my experience with Dreamweaver CS3 (aka DW9).

]]> http://chris.tantramar.com/2007/04/17/as-long-as-im-abusing-adobe/feed/ 0 http://chris.tantramar.com/2005/04/18/adobe_buys_macromedia/ http://chris.tantramar.com/2005/04/18/adobe_buys_macromedia/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:12:45 +0000 Chris http://chris.tantramar.com/?p=72 So Adobe’s buying Macromedia. Interesting.

From a customer’s perspective, these two companies seem very different, but they also share qualities.

Both companies enjoy natural monopolies which no one seems to especially mind (unlike Everyone’s Favorite Monopolist).

Macromedia delivers upgrades on a cycle that seems driven more by the calendar than by code-readiness. By contrast, Adobe releases solid upgrades that are ready for prime-time. This could be a good thing.

Adobe’s wounded feelings about Final Cut Pro (which you may recall was originally conceived at Macromedia), iMovie and iPhoto aside, Adobe’s history with feature-parity on the Mac has been a bit spotty in recent years (see Acrobats 4 through 7, SVG).

Macromedia also has issues in this regard; missing in action is ColdFusion MX 6.1 Developer Edition for Mac (not that Mac users get a discount on Studio MX, a play stolen from Adobe’s Acrobat pricing model…). Flash Player’s sluggishness on the Mac is also legendary.

What will be most interesting — as it always is in such cases — will be what survives and what doesn’t.

• Dreamweaver vs. GoLive (DW, I think)
• Flash vs. SVG (expect to see SVG support tossed on the heap next to LiveMotion)
• ImageReady vs. Fireworks (hard to say, I haven’t used Fireworks)
• Freehand vs. Illustrator (those who like Freehand like it a lot, and it’s survived being moved from Aldus to Altsys to Macromedia. I suspect they’ll integrate the Flash-friendly elements into Illustrator and retire it.)
• FlashPaper vs. PDF (neither will perish)
• InDesign vs. Quark (oh wait, that’s a different acquisition…)

The upside of all this will be

• Adobe will benefit from Macromedia’s mind-share among the web development crowd
• tighter integration between apps (Flash & Illustrator, Photoshop & After Effects)
• more consistent user-interfaces (Adobe has done a wonderful job with this, while Macromedia seems to annoy Mac and Windows users — “It’s too Mac-like!”, “It’s too Windows-like!”)
• Macromedia never seems to fix any of the bugs I care about. Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator (my main Adobe apps) have so few issues by comparison that I can’t comment on how fast they fix them.
• Hey, maybe Adobe can be convinced to breathe some life into Fontographer (another refugee from Aldus/Altsys)! That would be cool…
• The total in this buyout could easily be more than the sum of the parts.
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