ZDNet:

Adobe is Stopping development on Flash Player for browsers on mobile.

More elaboration:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

In case no-one realises, this is Adobe throwing in the towel for Flash being a viable general web technology. With this announcement, Flash just became Director: an authoring environment for apps and—until native web tech catches up—elaborate interactive desktop embedded web-page components (including games). Anyone who argues otherwise is deluded, given that browsing is rapidly transitioning to mobile and yet Adobe’s now exiting this market when it comes to Flash.

Still, Apple and its stupid decision to not support Flash on the iPhone and iPad, eh?

Update: Adobe Featured Blogs now has a post up on the company’s decision to quit making Mobile Flash.

Gary Marshall for TechRadar on the hypocrisy of government-led, court-ordered website blocks:

The other night I tried and failed to find a legitimate pair of Sennheiser headphones on eBay. There were fakes everywhere.

Would it be reasonable for Sennheiser to demand that the Post Office doesn’t deliver any counterfeit headphones to anyone in the UK, or that ISPs block eBay? Of course not – but that’s effectively what the BPI wants BT to do with the Pirate Bay.

From Macworld, quoting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

People like to talk about war [between tech companies]. There are a lot of ways in which the companies work together. There are real competitions in there, but I don’t think this is going to be the type of situation where there’s one company that wins all the stuff.

Google in some ways is more competitive and is certainly trying to build their own little version of Facebook.

Pretty clear Zuckerberg’s trying to disparage Google+, but he’s missing the point. Many people use Facebook now purely out of habit, not because they enjoy doing so; in fact, quite a few people I know absolutely despise Facebook and they only stick around because their friends are doing the same.

Facebook might be secure in that. It might think that social bonds are enough, and laugh in the face of competition from the likes of Twitter and Google+. I’d just like to remind them that MySpace and Friends Reunited thought precisely the same thing, but, abruptly, lots of people fled when they became bloated and rudderless, which is precisely what’s happening to Facebook today.

Zuckerberg has recently spoken about his mentoring from Steve Jobs. Perhaps he should take a leaf out of Jobs’s book, examine Facebook, and figure out how to make it beautiful and simple, rather than a mess of information fighting for users’ attention. Because sooner or later, there’s a good chance it’ll be too late.

Polls are wonderful when they lack details about who voted and also their understanding of the subject. It’s precisely for this reason that the British should never be let anywhere near a referendum on EU membership, because, in part through the idiocy of the national press, the country would shoot itself in the foot and cast itself into the wilderness, due to dumb stories about illegal bananas.

But anyway, today’s slice of stupid is reported in The Guardian, which provides the non-shock that people who don’t use social networks would be happy for them to be shut down during times of social unrest:

A poll of 973 adults carried out for the online security firm Unisys found 70% of adults supported the shutdown of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), while only 27% disagreed.

Three-quarters agreed that governments should have open access to data on social network users in order to prevent co-ordinated crime. Support for action against social networks was strongest among over-65s and weakest among 18 to 24-year-olds, who are the heaviest users of the online services.

This to me suggests those polled skewed not just to old people, but old people who haven’t yet discovered the internet. Sadly, there’s crossover there with MPs, who seem quick to slam Iran and China for restricting their people’s access to the web during times of strife, but who are nonetheless all too quick to suggest the British do the exact same thing. Presumably, it’s OK for the British to do this, because we have a good government, which can be trusted, unlike all those foreigns. Shit, sorry, I APPEAR TO BE CHANNELING THE DAILY MAIL. *punches self in face*

Unsurprisingly, The Guardian’s take is heavily biased towards online freedom, quoting heavily from people who believe social networking should not be curbed. And as the recent riots unfolded, my Twitter feed was full of people trying to help, not hinder. Again, this is something that people who don’t use social networks fail to understand: they are just a means for communication. They can be used for good things and bad things. I note, however, that the government and non-techies have yet to suggest television should be shut-down during times of social unrest, despite 24-hour news channels inadvertently providing ‘advice’ on where rioters should strike.

Sadly, this kind of attitude pervades throughout our entire society. When I recently interviewed Graham Linehan for .net,  he suggested there are almost two ‘levels’ of people now, which are those engaged in social media and those who decide they want nothing to do with it—and the latter group includes plenty of people in the media industry:

I’m talking about people who still get the majority of their information from four or five newspaper columnists. To me, they’re the people who you meet at parties, who say things like ‘Oh, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to know what you’re having for dinner!’. They still use these clichés, but everyone else is playing Vulcan chess.

In my role as games editor for Tap! magazine, I see and download more iOS games than most people, and so when trends occur, they tend to be very apparent to me. One that’s very much in full flow is the lardy iOS game. In some cases, it’s perhaps excusable for an iOS game to have a very large file-size, if it has a ton of art and other assets, but some recent downloads strike me as utterly crazy. Puzzle Quest 2—essentially a match-three game—weighs in at 576 MB. Worms Crazy Golf HD clocks in at 436 MB—for a side-on artillery game! (By contrast, the similar Super Stickman Golf is an eighth of that size.) And there are many other examples.

The problem is, things get worse on the device, because the app download is only half the story—the buggers then decompress on your device, since app bundles are essentially ZIP files. And then this happens:

• Modern Combat 3: 1.75 GB
• The Oregon Trail for iPad: 1.22 GB
• Puzzle Quest 2: 1.22 GB
• Worms Crazy Golf HD: 995 MB
• Infinity Blade (previously impressively svelte, but no longer): 923 MB
• Street Fighter IV Volt: 876 MB

And then there are countless fairly simple games racking up space into the hundreds of megabytes, often due to poor compression and a lack of interest in efficiency. A good point of comparison are the iOS ZX Spectrum emulators. Elite’s ZX Spectrum collection for iPad is well over 100 MB but the universal Spectaculator is just 19 MB when decompressed. Both apps are essentially the same, enabling you to play ancient Spectrum games on your device. Cracking open the app bundles reveals major differences in approach, though: Elite’s app is packed with hefty PNG files (each up to 2 MB in size—two thirds of the executable file, which is only 2.9 MB), used as full-screen backgrounds for every game’s selection screen. They make the app a little prettier, but also hugely increase its weight. Similar fairly pointless additions affect other iOS games, too, such as Namco’s Galaga collection, which weighs in at 144 MB, in part due to a pointless ‘you’ll only watch this once’ 36 MB movie being included in the app bundle. For good measure, all the jingles are WAV files, so you get 20-second clips of music weighing in at 1.5 MB or so each, rather than relatively tiny MP3s.

Most platforms tend towards bloat as developers learn new tricks and push them in terms of presentation, but iOS has two massive problems in this regard: devices have fixed storage, and updates must be downloaded in full. On the first of those points, if you have an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone, you cannot add extra storage. If your device is fairly full, are you going to delete a ton of games, music and apps to make way for the latest bloated ‘epic’, or are you going to think “sod that” and just download a smaller, sleeker game instead? (This, of course, makes the assumption people actually bother to look at such details; it’s more likely that many download games and only then get annoyed when they realise it wants to grab a fifteenth of their device’s storage, and that there’s no easy way of making room. And I’ll bet only a fraction of iOS device owners who do check app sizes in App Store listings realise apps decompress when on the device—Apple really should be listing expanded app sizes as well as download sizes.) On the second point, once you have a bunch of games, what then when updates appear? It’s all very well downloading a few updates for small apps, but those listed earlier in this article total several GB. If you’re on capped broadband, that’s a huge chunk of your monthly allowance; even if you’re not, you can tie up your bandwidth downloading such colossal games, thereby annoying other people in your household.

I can’t really see things changing. As iOS matures as a gaming platform, a large number of developers are getting sucked in by ‘realism’, ‘gloss’ and ‘3D’. Over time, we’re going to see more—not fewer—games that are in excess of 1 GB to download, and even larger on devices. But sooner or later, people are going to get sick of not being able to load new games, and of massive updates, and they’re just not going to bother. At that point, it’s the devs that care that should win out; and it’s not quite like the old days of squeezing every byte out of a VIC-20—all you’re really having to do is think a bit about your assets and the formats you use, which is a very slight compromise to your vision, in order to improve the practical side of user experience.