Now that Apple has created a viable tablet for use by th general phblic, it becomes a massive issue. Let’s provide an analogy. Let’s pretend that 20 years ago as the IBM AT computer was coming out they provide the same limitations to developers. Since IBM made a boatload of money at the time off of typerwriters and calculators and their supplies for them, they deny the right for Lotus or Word Perfect. As a result most businesses or home users find little value in the PC and developers don’t develop code for it. Instead of the massive innovations seen due to the openess of the platform, the home personal computer never gets off the ground and the literally millions of jobs created never happens.

Apple’s cool branding and marketing prowess have convinced even intelligent developers that aying inside of their proprietary sandbox is not only a good thing but innovative as well. Other major companies have seen this success and are trying to follow suit.

This is not innovation but pure corporate greed. Free flash based applications (which are very low CPU/memory utilization when well developed) compete directly with Apple’s App store. Good developers shy away from proving content on the platform because they can’t guarantee its security (HIPAA, BS17999, etc).

This might be a great thing for the developers of fart applications or content providers able to play by the rules. It is a horrible development for technology and innovation in the future. Anyone who doesn’t see this has had one cup too many of “Job’s Kool-Aid”.

I write this from my iPad, so not saying this out of hate but as someone who has been an avid technophile for over 30 years and is a respected senior technologist for a tier one company who gets paid to validate and integrate new and upcoming technologies.

Also, Apple has all the power and reason to change the accepted standards for app and web development. By narrowing the standards, I think we may also slowly get a more compatible and maybe faster running internet.

But this could,and I think should, be aside whatever limits they place on app development. I, as a consumer, appreciate the singularity that the iPhone and now the iPad give in where to search for resources, I like the app store. The iPad is their product, they could close everything up and only make their own apps and that would probably work, but they choose to utilize the creativity and horsepower of the programming public. It’s their right to dictate what languages apps for their product are written in.

There’s people that want to use the internet for openness, and people that want to use the internet to restrict people. Which camp are you in right now by supporting this?

None of this, however, has anything to do with the standard itself, which says nothing about codecs, and only describes how the tag itself works. Consider it similar to the img tag, which doesn’t require any open formats. That hasn’t impeded the success of JPG or PNG

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Well that’s some nice slight-of-hand since the biggest debate about HTML5 is that the standard refers to certain Apple PATENTED components.

http://sandfly.net.nz/blog/2009/05/the-html5-video-tags-fatal-flaw/

Quote: “This means that although all HTML5 browsers will support , there is no guarantee that they will be able to play and particular file. Firefox (at least the 3.5 beta) plays Ogg Theora, but Safari plays H.264 (a superior but expensive to license codec) but not vice versa”.

Has this changed? Even to the point that whatever will work on the iPad is “open and unencumbered”?

Am I mistaken about the codecs and formats the iP* version of Safari supports?

Oh really? Where can we see those apps? Ah that’s right, they either don’t exist, or are ‘best viewed’ in a niche browser such as Safari or Chrome and fall back onto Flash for video delivery. But I guess that’s ok as long as they support open standards, right? Maybe we should wait until the committee has finally agreed on a spec, a video codec and then updated the world’s browsers? How long may that take I wonder?

HTML5 currently doesn’t even support Flash’s features from 5 years ago. It can’t even replace a static video playback experience – no interactivity, no embeds, no fullscreen, no DRM (you or I may not give a damn about DRM but everyone with a content archive does). By time the spec is ready and widely supported your iPad will be running Flash Player 14 and you will be wishing that the committee would hurry up agreeing an HTML6 spec which has been in the works for the last 10 years…