Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Tanner, sorry I should have been more specific with VPN support, I was referring to a Check Point app.

btw, I wasn't aware the Slate of officially canceled. Hopefully its released before RIM releases their tablet.

Pretty well what all the tech sites are saying, it's been canceled. The timing of the Palm acquisition and cancellation of the Slate product does seem to support this.

RIM is planning on something, BlackPad. When, no idea. I think it's just like an oversized Storm like the iPad and the iPhone.

Exactly what I was thinking about that hypocritical letter that Steve Jobs posted regarding Flash.

I think Apple's issue with Flash has less to do with open standards than simply that Flash doesn't meet the standard for quality that Apple is trying to present to its users. The door isn't being shut because of a lack of flexibility. If Adobe can come up with a decent, much more stable product then I have absolutely no doubt that Apple would welcome them on to the iPhone OS with open arms. At present, Flash apps both on the web and on smartphones that can use flash are buggy, crash frequently and run slowly.

It's bad business for a company trying to launch a new platform (the iPad/iPhone OS 4.0) with buggy apps.

Apple is pressuring Adobe to pull up their socks. Adobe is lazy, and their developers are lazy, but ultimately the lure of money will force them to improve their product. Apple has ALREADY proved the success of a platform without Flash during the past three years - 50 million iphones and iPod Touches, iPads selling like hotcakes - they don't need to make that case again. Adobe is just pissed that they actually have to do some work. Wah, I say. Sorry you have to make your product better in order to get your snout in the fat trough that is the iPhone OS market. Get over yourselves and do it.

My beef for that is if Apple doesn't want Flash on there, at least let consumers make their own decisions on whether they want to use Flash or not.

Granted Apple doesn't want to deal with the backlash in poor performance when Flash is running as not everybody will understand that "by installing such and such Apple is no longer responsible for any performance issues or problems with this and that installed".

Give consumers the choice. It'll be a while before HTML5 is a standard on all browsers but until then Flash will continue to be popular.

I think that's a very generous opinion of Apple's complaints against Flash. With all of Flash's issues, and there are many, by Apple driving the discussion they're able to do a slight of hand with the iPhone OS compiler issue which is what Adobe (and other developers) are particularly unhappy with. Apple has dictated that that apps must also be originally written in Objective-C, C or C++ and these are the only ones which can link to the Apple provided API's. This limits what IDE dev's can use and goes to the heart of the complaint against Apple. Apple rightfully wants to keep their walled-garden and they don't want developers working on cross-platform applications which the new Creativity Suite gives access too.

It's an interesting discussion and it's fun to see how Apple is able to spin it in the media as a Flash discussion and not a development discussion.

"My beef for that is if Apple doesn't want Flash on there, at least let consumers make their own decisions on whether they want to use Flash or not."

Simple, don't buy Apple's products. The choice is there. As I said, Apple's been doing just fine without flash on their devices, despite their critics.

And that's what I do, I don't buy any of their products anymore. Last being a ipod video years ago.

They've been walking this road of closed/customer locked-in platforms since their very beginnings. I would think they've learned by now that road is a dead end.

Can you imagine the anti-trust suits that would be filed if Microsoft decided only .NET applications could legally be installed on a Windows machine?

This is the "mistake" that Microsoft made by not restricting/quality controlling the kind of hardware that can be used with their OS. As a result, everyone who doesn't know anything about computers and gets a BSOD because they bought shoddy hardware thinks M$ sucks.

While I don't like Apple, I can appreciate why they are not supporting certain technologies in their hardware.

So, did anyone get an ipad? Interested to know, and how you like it?

I've been playing around one for a week, all I can say Apple really has a weird perception of logic, I can't find myself comfortable using this thing. What I like about it is touch controls, portability, other than that at this point there isn't much you can do with it in terms of connectivity as well as productivity. Looks awesome, playing is great, but I can't see myself using it for anything else than pure reading/music/entertainment

I am getting mine today .......................

we use it as our 'sofa computer' - my wife uses it to read e-books (kindle/kobo/etc apps - she's read 6 books so far), I use it to control our mac mini/media centre.. both of us use it to play games and surf the web/twitter/email.. I use it to read comic books (cbr files) as well.

Just this week I suspended my print subscription to the globe and mail ($34/mo) in favour of a digital subscription app that downloads an enhanced pdf of the print edition every morning (for $19/mo) - after a year I'll have saved almost $200 and hundreds of pounds of newsprint. I've used it three times so far to present photos to clients and friends.

I picked one up and it's not a replacement for my Mac computer...but mainly a portable surfing/email and emergency work tool (through a remote desktop to Windows application). Haven't been able to track down the SD card reader attachment yet so I can't comment on how useful it would be out in the field shooting.

It's very quick for what I need it for but I suggest if you are looking to purchase to figure out what you really want it for. A netbook might be a better choice for some, but I never really liked any that were available.

it's more portable than netbook for sure, and works awesome as a portfolio book as well, too bad you can't leave it

Well as I stand here reading what you guys wrote. I am responding from an iPad at the eaton centre apple store. This thing is pretty wicked. I could definitely see using it to present images.

David

That's what I like about it. Great device to show clients your portfolio.

Umm...someone may have already mentioned this but I highly doubt it matters one iota if Adobe makes a version of flash that works amazingly on all mobiles while using absolutely no resources.
Personally I think it all has to do with webapps and the apps store. It's all about $$$ or rather the potential loss in $$$ from letting Flash into Apples mobile devices.
Besides, whatever Jobs says, HTML5 + Javascript just does not do what Flash can. Only a subset. And until they do, or until something else comes around (that Apple supports), there will always be a need for Flash (albeit it will probably be only in infrequent cases). Till then, there will always be holes in the internet on Apples mobile devices.

On a more happier tone, the iPad is a damn well designed device even with it's wrinkles. What it does, I think it does really well.
For on the couch stuff, I think it'll be great.
Light surfing, listening to music, looking at photos, reading etc.
On the other hand, they better get their act together and fully support multitasking...
Still, if the price was cheaper, I would love getting one myself. As of now, getting an iphone (or equivalent) seems to be a smarter choice except for viewing photos and reading. Though for reading, dedicated e-readers are much better suited.

I am playing with this for the last couple of hours................
Its very user friendly .....and sweet ...love the display....
Just a little heavy ...apart from it ..I love it.....
Yeshwanth

Not to mention HTML5 is about two years away from being released as a standard and many, many years away before the majority of the present Flash based sites migrate to it.

yes because supporting non-yet-standard software/hardware has been the undoing of Apple in the past?

I would point out that Apple's been flogging a non-flash platform for three or four years now with astounding success: the iPhone.

As people like to say, the iPad is 'just a big iPhone' - well, it's not really, it's something different. Apple has already proven you don't need Flash to be a hit. Flash, in a word, sucks. That's why it's not on the iPhone OS. The standard is too elastic and programmers are simply too lazy with it. The end product is too unpredictable and it lessens users' experience because of it.

Apple will do just fine without Flash.

Time will tell.
So far most of the closed platforms, Apple included, have gone the way of the dodo.

Hi Yesh,

It is pretty sweet eh?? I took the plunge against even my own better judgement. Just got it setup, as I was away for the weekend. I love using this thing for typing emails, and surfing the web. That is where I see the strength of the iPad over turning on my laptop for ordinary tasks such as those. I have also sync'd my outlook calendar and contacts too, so I have everything I need without having to carry my laptop all the time. I like it!

David