Adobe Flash and Apple iDevices

In http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ writes about the reasons Flash is not allowed on the iPhone and iPad. My 0.02 fiat money's worth is that I see Job's point about Flash not being touch sensitive and having been designed for last-generation devices, and Flash not being appropriate for apps.

I recall the evangelistic tone to the Human Interface guide of the first Macintoshes. The big deal was consistency and economy of motion. Apple has done a great job on the user interface of its devices since then. Now, think about Flash plug-ins in web browsers. When one comes upon a Flash element on a web site, there is no telling what the user interface might be. Consistency is not in Flash'es vocabulary.

Yes it's a pain to a web developer knowing that if I put Flash into a web site, mobile users will not be able to use it. On the other hand, I would rather see Apple in complete control of the stack of software yielding the user interface of my iDevices.

I watched the WallStreet Journal interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and sure he has the Flash ecosystem to defend. His retort about Mac OS should be fixed if Flash causes crashes was a cheap shot but it is somewhat revealing. Change your operating system and your user interface to accommodate my software. I side with Jobs and would rather use the new HTML5 standard on my web sites that would be viewable on iPhones and iPads.

Testing txting from cell phone to blog. Why I would want to blog from cell is good question

Ugly TypeFace Rending of FireFox on PCs

I recently came across http://browserlab.adobe.com/. I examined several of the sites I manage and to my chagrin, some functionality did not work on all browsers on the PC and Mac. One especially annoying discovery (which I suspected earlier) was that the same page would display ugly with Firefox on the PC, okay with Internet Explorer on the PC, and okay on Mac FireFox and Safari. How could that be?  A little sleuthing on the net revealed that there is a setting in the PC control panel for enabling ClearType. That resolves the problem. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306527. Do my clients and their users look at their web sites via PC Firefox and barf?

The more germane question is whether ClearType is automatically set in Vista or  Windows 7. It doesn't appear to be default in XP.