We’re about to hit the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Flash open letter. Within, he rallied against suggestions Flash was ‘open’ (given that it’s a proprietary plug-in), and argued that Adobe had hardly delivered regarding releases and performance:

We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

According to Technologizer, a year later, the answer is clear: Flash still pretty much sucks on a tablet.

I watched Best of Show on Amazon Video on Demand in hopes of performing an informal battery test. It drained the battery from 44% full to 15% full in one hour and 20 minutes. But during that time, the audio got out of sync, and then the picture froze–and I couldn’t get Flash to work properly again without rebooting the Xoom.

I watched Glee in HD, again on Amazon, and it would play smoothly in full-screen mode for a few seconds, then sputter, then play smoothly, then sputter…

I tried Bejeweled on Facebook; it was playable, but the animation was herky-jerky.

Google’s Picnik photo editor sort of works–I could load photos and apply effects. But the sliders that are everywhere in the interface don’t function properly; I don’t think they really understand touch input.

Of course, the Flash Player version running is still billed as ‘beta’, and doesn’t support hardware acceleration, but that merely backs up Jobs’s original thoughts, and justifies Flash’s not being supported on the iPad. Or, as Technologizer itself puts it, “the version you want is always not quite here yet”. The article sums up the current situation of Flash on tablets nicely:

We’ll know that Flash Player for Android makes sense when having it is clearly better than not having it…

As it stands, Flash for tablets is nothing more than a bullet point—a stick to beat Apple with. Unfortunately for Apple’s rivals, it’s able to counter that stick with the iPad 2—a baseball bat with a chainsaw attached.

Flatly contradicting a Sunday Times report in February that claimed Jonathan Ive was leaving Apple (which I commented on in an article on this blog), the Daily Mail yesterday posted a lengthy profile on the designer, with a very different viewpoint:

It is hard to know what is the greater intrigue: recent conjecture that he is preparing to walk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somerset so his children can be educated in the UK (false – he is not, and the property is now standing empty); that he will step out of the shadows and assume Steve Jobs’ role when the great man stands down (highly doubtful); or what – or perhaps more accurately who – propelled him to leave for the U.S. in the first place and deny Britain the talents of one of the most influential designers of the modern age.

And the usual unnamed source weighs in with:

Speculation that Ive would leave Apple to return to the UK is also false, says a former colleague: “I’m not sure there is any truth he wants to come back. My last conversations with him were that he was planning to sell his house in the UK.”

Until Ive himself officially makes a statement one way or the other, no-one will know for sure what the designer plans to do, but I still maintain that him leaving Apple seems unlikely, and that, in order to stay at the Cupertino giant, he won’t be moving back to the UK.

If that’s the case, that also means that I’m agreeing with the Daily Mail, which makes me want to scrub my brain clean with a wire brush.

Despite the Trainspottings and Shaun of the Deads (Shauns of the Dead?) of this world, there’s still a belief that Brits ultimately have two choices when creating a new film:

• Period drama with politeness and kings.
• Slightly implausible comedy, written (by law) by Richard Curtis.

To that end, it’s great to see indies continuing to do decidedly un-British movies. Upcoming is Joe Cornish’s sci-fi comedy Attack The Block (Empire, trailer), where aliens rather stupidly decide to invade our planet by way of South London estates.

The trailer looks pretty good (despite its penchant for hateful teal and orange colour-grading), but it could yet fall foul of American stupidity. According to Dark Horizons, US execs are considering subtitling the film, because of those tricky South London accents. As if a good chunk of Americans don’t already have an excuse to not watch the film (it not being American), subtitling it will surely keep people away in droves.

Still, this entire story, while sad, doesn’t shock me. I remember seeing a US backlash to Shaun of the Dead, with people—without irony—complaining about the ‘difficult’ accents, including Simon Pegg’s. Frankly, if you’re from the USA and you can’t decipher Simon Pegg’s accent, you’re pretty much fucked when it comes to watching films and TV shows from the UK. Hell, you’re probably pretty much fucked understanding anyone from outside of your town or immediate family.

Oh, stunning. Over on Develop, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has spewed shit from his mouth in the form of words, splattering them all over the internet. He says Nintendo will embrace the independent developer, but “draws the line” with less-established garage outfits:

[Nintendo will] separate out the true independent developer versus the hobbyist.

Where we’ve drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue.

Fuck you, Reggie. If ever I needed proof that Nintendo had utterly lost it regarding gaming, this is it. ‘Garage’ indies are the lifeblood of the industry—they always were. Hell, when the industry first started, tiny indies were pretty much it—those single coders who created innovative, exciting new product again and again.

In the modern age, there is a hell of a lot of crap on iOS, but to tar all hobbyists with the same brush is pretty much like saying “but we want to continue sucking up to majors, because they all do wonderful games, every time”. In other words, it’s bullshit.

Some home coders create the most wonderful games imaginable, free from the fury of focus groups. They are one person’s vision, not one person’s vision smashed to pieces by the so-called realities of modern videogame production, which forces games into neat little pre-packaged boxes. On iOS, many of the very best games have been created by home coders—hobbyists—holding down other jobs. Some of these guys have then gone on to become what our chum Reggie would call a “true independent developer”, but they’ve only been able to do so due to the App Store not drawing arbitrary lines in the sand of the kind Nintendo’s enforcing.

Still, you keep on going, Nintendo. Keep on releasing a new console every few years, supporting it with loads of great games for a few months, then reverting to getting people to buy new hardware (Look! This one’s ORANGE! And this one vaguely resembles the packaging of a game we put out in 1987!) rather than concentrating on games. You eschew the smaller indies that could make your hardware great. You continue on your downward slope, because, despite being a huge Nintendo fan for years, your attitude towards ‘garage’ developers makes me sick.

Johnny Davis in the Guardian:

The “i” in iMac was supposed to stand for “internet”, but the first models had no slot drives – users had no way of burning their own CDs or DVDs. Given that almost 30m PCs were sold with this capability during 2000, Apple had missed a trick.

Really? REALLY? Having been woken this morning at 6 a.m. by the army seemingly blowing up the local countryside, I’m pretty fucking tired (and, frankly, more than a little grumpy). But even if I’d not slept all night and had instead spent the night drinking a combination of whisky and more whisky, I’d have not made the error Davis does above. Hell, even a 12-year-old copying bits of Wikipedia would not have made that error, assuming they could read and parse basic information.

This leads me to the following reasoning. Pick one or more from:

• Johnny Davis can write but, sadly, cannot research/read.
• Johnny Davis drinks far too much whisky before writing articles.
• Johnny Davis, like so many people writing about tech these days, doesn’t understand enough about what he’s writing about.
• Johnny Davis frankly doesn’t give a fuck, and the Guardian subs can’t be arsed to do basic fact-checking.
• And the get-out-clause for Johnny Davis (because I’m feeling generous): one of the Guardian’s subs needs beating to death with a trowel and/or a surprisingly weighty 1990s Mac laptop.

Still, I am tired, so maybe I’m misremembering and was totally hallucinating the optical drives in the original iMac (which were tray-based rather than slot-loading, and yes, a lack of burning, but GET YOUR GENERAL FACTS RIGHT IF YOU’RE CONCOCTING AN ARGUMENT), and the fact the only ‘missing’ drive was the dead-in-the-water floppy. Yes, that must be it. After all, someone paid large sums of cash to write for a national newspaper wouldn’t get such utterly basic facts wrong, would they?