As you might have noticed, this blog’s gone into one of its quieter patches, mostly because I’m currently drowning in iOS games for my Tap! magazine duties. The good is that I get to play and write about cracking* iOS games. The bad is that I don’t really have time to do anything else for a few days. However, this also gives me a nice excuse to mention the spiffy new website for the publication, www.tapmag.co.uk, which will carry reviews, posts from editor Christopher Phin (and maybe some of us other contributors if he gives us the magic key), and handy links so you can subscribe.

Anyway, back to Dungeon Raid and Liqua Pop.

* As in “Cracking cheese, Gromit!”, not dodgy app piracy.

Andy Ihnatko on the iPad 2:

Many of you were around for the transition from text to graphical user interfaces. Some of you were even around when the world shifted from mainframes to personal computers. Well, congratulations: you’ve lived to see your third revolution in computing.

Interesting that Apple’s been instrumental in all three of these revolutions:

• The Apple II was one of the first personal computers, boasting then-rare built-in features, such as colour graphics, sound and a keyboard.
• Mac OS popularised the graphical user interface, in a time when people were staring glumly at command lines.
• And now iOS has kickstarted a touchscreen revolution that every other major player in the industry is clamouring to join.

It’ll also be interesting to see what the fourth revolution will be—and whether Apple will be a part of it.

In the US, iPad prices remained put when the iPad 2 arrived, a smart move on Apple’s part, given that most of its competitors are, at best, price-matching with their closest equivalent products. In the UK, however, something more curious has happened: the iPad’s price is to drop with the iPad 2.

The entry level model (16 GB Wi-Fi) will cost £399, down 30 quid, and you get £20 and £40 savings on the 32 and 64 GB models, which are priced £479 and £559, respectively. As with the original iPad, 3G adds £100 to the pricing, which again means savings over the original model.

Despite rumours to the contrary, Apple has stated the iPad 2 will be released on March 25 in 25 countries, including the UK, Canada, Germany and France. One curious addition is Iceland, which lacks its on iTunes Store, so it’s unknown how people there are supposed to acquire apps and other content.

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.