I don't see it. Don't you use this on your lap? The view of your face from down there will be less than flattering.

I could use the dock instead of having it on my lap.

Welcome to the madhouse

Yes, hi Peter.

Adobe says it believes Apple will cave to public pressure and one day support Flash on the iPhone.

The software firm made the claim as it announced that it was bringing its Air platform to mobile phones, which allows developers to create Flash applications that can be delivered through a variety of mobile app stores.

Adobe has been racing to keep pace with the proliferation of smartphones, netbooks and now tablet PCs, and has built an alliance of industry leaders to work on making web browsing consistent across devices.

The environment has been further complicated by players such as Apple, Nokia and Vodafone rolling out their own application stores, opening up proprietary distribution channels that compete with simply browsing the web.

David Wadhwani, who runs Adobe's Platform business, says Adobe will continue to support both ways of distributing Flash. It has already published tools that offer developers a way to convert Flash applications into ones that work on the iPhone.

"We personally believe very strongly that open distribution will be the model that will prevail, but we're agnostic," he said. "Ultimately, the consumer will decide."

Adapting power-hungry video applications that work well on everything from desktop PCs to mobile devices has posed a major challenge. Running such applications can also quickly drain batteries.

Apple has until now rejected Flash on these grounds, and has also claimed that Flash is "buggy," blaming it for instances of Macs crashing.

"We reject the accusation that Flash is buggy," said Wadhwani, and pointed to the fact that Apple makes money when consumers buy through the App Store, but not when they access content via their web browser.

"Apple would like to move rich content off the web and into its App Store, where it can more readily monetise it," he added.

"I suspect that what will happen is that as we have more devices in the market... Apple will have more market pressure to include Flash on the iPhone," he said.

If HTML5 is agreed upon then will we even worry about the lack of Flash? If I can get it all with Safari (and HTML 5) why would I need Flash?

Well that's what's worrying Adobe, certainly.

iPad pitch to the Wall Street Journal laid bare

Steve Jobs took the iPad to the Wall Street Journal to explain why the paper should drop Adobe's Flash, to a cool reception.

The details of Mr. Jobs' presentation to staff at the Journal were revealed by ValleyWag. They included his dismissal of Adobe's Flash technology along with the arguments about why the Journal should drop it and embrace Apple's vision of the future.

Starting out with the familiar mantra that Flash is full of bugs, crashes all the time, eats resources and poses an unacceptable security risk, Steve Jobs went on to dismiss the technology as redundant and explained that Apple has a history of leading the way when it comes to dropping support for outdated technologies.

According to the ValleyWag report, he cited Apple's lead in disposing of floppy drives, outmoded data ports and CDs: all things that are equally as redundant as Flash, apparently. We don't miss floppy drives (though the old 8-inch'ers used to fly well), but serial and parallel ports still turn up every now and then, while CDs still account for the vast majority of music sales despite Apple's success with on-line sales.

Those are all hardware, of course, but then hardware is Apple's traditional business.

The argument then got into the technical process of shifting the WSJ content out of Flash and into HTML 5, something that Steve Jobs suggested would be "trivial". There's a lot of video to recode, however, and creating JavaScript interfaces for all those interactive side-bars and charts will take some work. Not to mention the laying off of all the Flash-skilled staff and their replacement with people who know JavaScript well enough to write code, and have the graphical skills necessary to create decent interfaces.

It seems to us that the last bit would be furthest from "trivial".

But ValleyWag concludes that despite all this, the Wall Street Journal will just swallow its pride and drop Flash in order to be part of the iPad revolution.

We're not quite so convinced that Mr. Murdoch (owner of the Journal, Fox News, Sky TV, The Times, The Sun and so forth) will be quite so willing to re-engineer his product to suit Apple. At least, not without significant concessions on the Cupertino side.

Flash is a PITA. Sadly for Crapple, a lot of websites currently depend upon it. I spent quite some time in the Databases lecture the other day attempting to find Eluveitie to listen to.. VPN is required on the wireless to reach anything other than the VPN server, and while Safari was quite capable of managing this, the Youtube app on my iPoo simply failed repeatedly. And of course since Flash is not supported, that means Safari is no damn good either.

Mr. Lee will handle digital media, which includes everything from Web sites to social networks to the DC Universe Online role-playing game. In particular, the advent of the Apple iPad is “going to be very important for the future of digital publishing,” Mr. Lee said. “We’re going to be in that space.”