with the iPad announcement, the whole debate about Apple’s lack of support for Flash is ignited again.
unfortunately, some of the public seems believe be that the reason Apple doesn’t support Flash is to sell more games via the App Store. not true. Apple makes money selling devices, not apps. so Apple would actually make a lot more money by supporting Flash in the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad – because they’d sell more devices.
Flash (and Silverlight) is bad for the web: it’s the only ‘de facto’ web standard (for delivering video) that’s proprietary and controlled by a single company. That’s bad for the web. “How you get video on the web” shouldn’t be something owned by a single company. Fortunately, HTML5 is well supported and on it’s way to obviating the need for Flash for video.
Flash is bad for the Mac: Gruber gets it: customers can send their Mac crash reports to Apple, and it turns out the #1 reason they crash is because of Flash. Flash is written well for Windows, but not for Mac/Linux. It uses a lot of CPU and it’s buggy. So the main reason Apple computers crash is because of this buggy app that Apple can’t fix for it’s customers. Clearly, it doesn’t make sense to perpetuate the situation with it’s new mobile devices.
i get sick to the stomach thinking about the hundreds (thousands?) of dollars my family has paid (and continues to pay) to AOL for *email*. there’s 3 main reasons why they don’t just switch to something like Gmail:
They’ve built up their address book in AOL (there is no export option)
They have a bunch of old mail messages in AOL (and don’t know how to move it)
All their friends know the AOL email address (and there is no forwarding service).
here’s how to address these issues and stop the reaming:
1. Import AOL Address Book into Gmail: there are many ways to skin this cat, but here’s the easy option i’ve found.
Sign up for a free account at plaxo.com
During the signup process, enter your AOL login and it will read in all your contacts.
From the main screen, select More: Address Book: Add sync point (at the bottom), then Export CSV (Outlook format)
Then, simply import the CSV into Gmail and all your contacts will be there.
2. Import AOL Mail into Gmail: Using Mail.app (or any other IMAP desktop client):
Setup the IMAP account for your AOL Mail (settings here)
3. Notify everyone about your new Gmail address: since AOL doesn’t forward your messages, you’ll have to do the old fashioned method of telling everyone about your new email address and ask them to use it from now on. Fortunately, sending an email to all your contacts is easy from Gmail:
Go to your Gmail contacts
Click Select: All
Click Groups: New Group and name it “Everyone”
Then, “Compose Mail”, “Add Bcc”, and type in “Everyone”. The group list will expand into everyone’s email address.
Then type the rest of your message, asking folks to use your new Gmail account from now on.
There ya go. Hope this helps some people out. Death to AOL Mail!
Update: it seems that AOL Mail is free on the web to everyone, even if you cancel your AOL paid membership. So now I just want to make sure that nobody is actually paying AOL for membership for the sake of having their email address. And I still recommend switching to Gmail.
nexus app for facebook is pretty wild. it visually graphs out all your friend relationships. for example, here’s mine. the cluster with all the names displayed are my college friends from Atlanta, who are quite naturally their own little universe and disconnected from my other friends.
the pirate bay, one of the largest torrent tracker sites, is on trial. it should be interesting, because they’ve always openly mocked and challenged Hollywood to try & stop them. here’s their homepage today:
“We’re not seeing large numbers of people dropping their television service due to either financial hardship or the fact they can get video increasingly on the Internet,” Comcast COO Stephen Burke said on this morning’s earnings call.
sometimes the iphone-optimized web is more efficient than using the real web. here’s my fluid ssb that gives me a nice birds-eye view of hahlo (twitter), gmail, and facebook.
