Thought I would break the silence here and share Steve Jobs’ letter about Flash and iPhone/iPad and why apple is not bending over backwards to make it happen. The arguments are fairly valid and- in my humble opinion- completely reasonable.

click here to go to the original letter.

“Thoughts on Flash

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. 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?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010″

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So there.

Now that I have quoted Steve I will also repeat my own words from a thread on Digg:

IMHO- people only even care about flash when it affects this or that little website widget- but content developers are filling those gaps anyways.

I have worked for years with flash and it is great when it is needed or whatever- but in too many cases it is a crutch for bad interface designers and shortcut types. Not to say it isn’t a fantastic program that serves several useful and entertaining purposes- again, I have used it on projects regularly through the years- but it has always puzzled me that it is such a make or break issue- when, really, I think it is more of the pc/mac feud gone android/iphone.

And the feud is dumb. I like my macs, I like my iphone. Anyone and everyone are welcome to use whatever they like- and all the better as it keeps us all with the ability to choose the best product for our needs. It doesn’t make the worth of the user go down just because you disagree with them- you know?

Seriously- I want to post here- but it takes a lot of work just to get where there is something to post about. Since becoming “a guy with a really wide open schedule” my life has gone all higgledy piggledy and it seems I am always tinkering, adventuring, visiting or running out to the store to pick something up.

I have a lot of tutorials in store and recently upgraded to snow leopard for the new QT as it will be instrumental in my screen recording synth making madness in the future.

I recently posted a new track over at soundcloud.

Hmm… doing some fun secret testing for a certain software company… Went and made a video with a band you have more than likely heard of… Other crazy possibilities loom on the horizon presently. Life is busy, I can’t be arsed…. having addressed it, there will likely be a sudden flurry of posts in the future.

I would feel worse about it if I wasn’t still way ahead of Todd on the post count… On the other hand he has better excuses… Something about babies and network television.

OK- this whole thing would be a lot longer if I were to begin demanding for an explanation about dubstep. This week I was informed by a wide range of people a wide range of things about dubstep in response to all having been asked the same question- enabling me to launch into a far greater query on the state of electronic genre creation decisions- to make a long story short: wanna have some fun? Go ask people to tell you in their own words what dubstep is.

We’ll talk more about this shortly… In the meantime-

James Benard’s tip page, facebook etc seem to be off to a good start and thus far I am quite excited about a resource that will likely be the coolest thing on the internet after 52 weeks if these first two are anything to go by.

This week, James is teaching us about making a dubstep wobble bass- ( “AHA, that’s why Paul was rambling back there, to avoid some argument about the genre or the bass patch with some douchebag”) and the most interesting thing about this lesson is that James gets inside the Thor mod matrix and shows users how to set up a very basic LFO governed change. While tweakers well be like “yeah- so?” the cool part is where it looks like the series will be going is James sitting in demoing complex combi routing and deep tweaking. I am of the opinion that with the right mind and knowledge set, Reason is a fully capable synthesis and sampling workstation and if these vids are of this caliber throughout, I expect they will publicize a lot of my logic in doing do.

….excitedly awaiting week 3…

Propellerhead product specialist (omfg my dream job) James Bernard has established what works out to be 3 new places for you to learn more about our favorite software suite (reason/record/recycle- don’t forget, we are officially propellerwhores now.)

In what looks to be a once a week tutorial series, James will be releasing 52 tutorial vids that you can watch at your choice of:

1. His official page at the propellerhead site:
http://www.propellerheads.se/substance/product-specialist/

2. His Vimeo Page:
http://www.vimeo.com/user3205543

….and, naturally…

3. His Facebook Page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/James-Bernard-Propellerhead-Software/298101597761

The first tutorial went up this week and is a worthwhile look at using the simple side chaining /insert FX options in the record channel strip for some suitably modern gating effects. Certainly worth a watch if the mention of it didn’t make you go “oh, that shit- call me next week Paul, you punk ass bitch.”
….And frankly, if that was how you responded- we need to talk, because this kind of unchecked aggression can’t be good for your music.

Have a good weekend. Sunny and lovely here.

A major factor in the hold up for all things SFR oriented has been what started as a fairly innocent review attempt of the Record software package back in October.
After dicking around with the beta during the summer, both Mr. Tanner and I were inclined to review the software- initially having decided he would helm that and I would focus on Ableton stuff…
As things often do, this scheme ran aground and Todd was quite busy at the time of release, hardly having time to get his recording in, let alone review the application he did it with- so I (not very busy in a trend that occupied the latter part of 2009) had recently gotten my Reason 4 License and was getting annoyed with the automap fail that is ableton integration… so after a few mumbles, coin tosses and quick chat exchanges with Todd, it was resolved that I would also go and get my record license.
And I started working with it. Reason, my longtime happy place in terms of recording and writing, had already been trying to convince me to abandon the slate gray science kit of Ableton live and get back to good old fashioned linear commitment. I used to shit songs out sitting at an emac and dicking off with Reason, yet Ableton became this vortex of unfinished, over auditioned loops of loops looping. Not that nothing ever got finished- in fact, there were some quick proper jobs even done within Abes… but it is not my cup of tea, in the long run. I think I must be missing some DJ cool factor/ science over soul philosophy/ something… At any rate, being completely in love with my novation nocturn, I really liked how reason 4 worked with it- and going into record with all that same functionality really, REALLY did it for me. Also, the new “lanes” method of working really lends itself to automation without fear of getting tangled deep in a web of automation lines etc…
Within a few weeks there had been an Ableton upgrade and I knew nothing about it. It was time to lock in with a new baby. It sets EVERYTHING in one’s life back about 10 months to change suites as near as I can tell. I have gone from cakewalk > cubase > fruityloops/cubase/acid > broken PC > Mac > reason + pro tools free > studios > hardware again > pro tools > ableton > reason + record.
Every time took a gagillion years to get things generally where I could sit in, start up and get working straightaway.
With Record + Reason, granted, as years long reason user- I was in familiar turf… but i think it took like a week to get to where I was just trying different start up template designs and I have been cozy and snug within, having recently made the decision to begin an album proper in the current format. The only MAJOR workflow change I have been through with it was missing a certain aspect of Ableton that I was able to get back quickly and, frankly, more effectively when I purchased ReCycle- which I think is so essential it should be built in- but for now I enjoy my status as “all in customer” so we’ll grouse about that some other time.
Point being, that months in I am totally committed to using reason/record- In fact, it has been an essential philosophical turning point in how I make records/ sounds and has been a major stylistic turning point for me as well. I find myself pushing those synths harder and working with things as they are- not idly plug in shopping on the web. I got rid of my Focusrite Liquid Mix 32 in hopes that a more needy user would enjoy it- as I was mainly using the SSL emulations anyways and Scream 4 OOOZES enough character for anyone- so why bother with a plastic case with about 60 something emus I am barely using…
Quite frankly, all the bells and whistles, plug in suites, etc etc- as I look back on years of buying into all of this- seems silly.
The fact is that the Propellerhead suite gives me everything I need in a very musical setting, fatigues neither my ears nor my eyes for LOOOOONNNNG work periods- and encourages me to experiment without having to toggle endlessly to make sure I didn’t just screw the mix. So many times we look for a plug in, looking for a sound that isn’t there, or that may be there but we can’t be sure and there is no forum weighing in on it… This is the magic of the closed suite, the dedicated forum and the “all in one” solution. I am sure record is missing something, for someone- my personal shopping list for it includes asking for a pitch correction system that will free me from Antares and their damnable iLok and let me just carry all my stuff on the Propellerhead key…. It will all come with time- this is version one and blows away anything I have ever used. Been running since October with not ONE crash. Ever. Seriously.
Getting back to “The Point”….
And that is- we are gonna make this love OFFICIAL. Here at SFR, from this day forward- we are gonna dedicate a lot of focus to record/reason as a recording environment, artists who work with these software packages etc etc etc. Not to say we are gonna ignore the wild worlds beyond our “not a DAW,” but we might not be too focused on the latest greatest plug in pack, VSTi or whatever.
Reason + Record is the shit and we hope you give it a chance if you haven’t tried it. Just forget whatever plug in it can’t replace for one afternoon and see what you get done not being able to scout through every folder on your drive trying to remember where that one synth is at….

THX. More propaganda will be along shortly…

Hot Chip on Jimmy Fallon- I am drawn to conclude that The Roots as house band leads to some of the coolest pairings ever. I also like having a way to watch ?uestlove do random stuff all the time instead of chasing him from session to session/ artist to artist to keep up with the coolest picked fro in the drumming business….

I dunno every little thing about their catalog, but I am pretty sure this has something to do with upcoming newness… Nice to see the boys out and trotting after studio tales and Joe Goddard’s record about fruit and veg.

Yep Damon and Co are back- and today “and Co” includes Bobby Womack and Mos Def. This week dropping new single Stylo- looks like I’m not the only one loving the electro throwback and Plastic Beach- due out March 3rd- is set to be YET ANOTHER HOT ASS BUCKET OF HITS FROM HELL.
So tune out everyone you know who won’t stop fiddling with their scarf and talking about the new Spoon and give a listen to this.

Took the weekend off after resurrecting last week and fighting the spam droids off… Such a beautiful day today I can’t help but keep blowing things off a little longer- but I want to share and absolutely amazing piece from a BBC Arena interview with Brian Eno conducted by none other than Paul Morley.
Eno never disappoints and any conversation with him seems to be an invigoration for the creative soul- Somehow he blends the retrospective and a cultural forecast into one- always reminding you where things are going by pointing out where they were- and it never feels anything less than natural, obvious and simultaneously brilliant.
Read it and ponder.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

2010’s portable power theme continues and includes (OMGAWD YAWL SOOO SURPRISED) plans for the ubiquitous iPhone. Akai are set to release their Synth Station app this month. Don’t quote me on this, but what sources have been listing the price for this are saying $9.99 and I will be grabbing this up as soon as it releases. I assume it will arrive next Tuesday- but you never know with these things…
That, however, is not the end of the news surrounding Akai’s foray into the wild world of Mr. Jobs- the big leap for this app comes in with the iPK25.

Yes, yet another 2 octave controller jumps into the fray- but this one works with your iPhone installed as an LCD display and provides alternate sound outputs- effectively transforming your iPhone into a decent performance synth/portable workstation. All of this is going to be dependent on the capabilities of the synthstation app- and we won’t have the controller til March. So I am personally holding my breath and hoping for a decent extra synth around to throw into productions or whip out at random… but we’ll know more once I get my hands on the app.

Meanwhile, floor demos reportedly had some lag issues (prototype) between the iPK and the app- but the sounds were impressive (they say.) So it looks like a positive release from AKAI. Thank God, because aping nanos and reboxing the MPC every 5 seconds is a bit wanktastic. Anyways, read more about the synth station and ithe iPK25 respectively at the Akai website… where you can also take a gander at the new APC-20 and MINIAK that I will talk about shortly if you don’t feel like waiting on me…

So let’s start with the real new hotness:

Musikmesse 09 had a non-working but potentially amazing product on the horizon called the OP-1. This thing is a controller, workstation, recorder, synth… I think it even has a radio… and a gun that looks like a pen… and ejector seats… OK- some of that stuff I made up- but the thing seemed impossible. Here we are at NAMM and it is alive and well after a bit of frightening quiet- but now in the working prototype stage- we have the OP-1 in the flesh!
Anyways, the man talking on this linked vid has a kind of germanic mumble going on, but the guys at musicradar did their best to inquire about the story with the product.
Anyone already aware of the product prior to this NAMM showing will likely want to know the hard date/ street price data… which the Germanic mumbly man says “late 2010- early 2011 at 500-1000 dollars…” Not the low priced marvel I might have dreamed of- but certainly enough lead time to sock away some pennies…

Comprehensive details about the OP-1 available here at the teenage engineering website.