With that mindset, the current religious war in the web development community (though commonly propagated mainly by Angry Internet Men of unclear merit) about the relative merits of HTML5 vs Flash has grown tremendously in scope with the launch of the iPad and Apple’s latest changes to the iPhone 4 SDK agreement.

Suddenly, it’s no longer about Steve Jobs’ hissy fits and Apple/Adobe’s past. It’s now about what it means to be a developer, the tools you choose, the platform you wish to work on. It’s another apocalypse then; The corporations are taking away our anarchistic developer rights to go anywhere, do anything! Time to wave banners, and while we’re at it, choose sides. You know, good/html5/css/js, evil/plugins, or any combination thereof. Whatever.

Holy hell guys! Isn’t this the most BORING shit ever?

Listening to knowitalls babble on about standards and “what’s right” and future proofing, Jesus, how boring can you get?! Stop being so damn boring! Stop saying boring things! Go make some cool shit! Bouncing fucking gradient balls man, let’s go! HTML5 dudes, Flash dudes, jQuery dudes, all of y’all, go make some god damn gradient balls! Make some shape tweening text! Make text adventure games or drawing apps or art or music tools or publishing tools or an awkwardly animated horse that sings or something.

One of the best things about maturing as a developer is watching your horizon broaden.

Man, I love being a developer. I love looking at a screen and an input device and think about what I can do with them. I love digging into frameworks. It’s a ton of fun! It’s engineering, right? You put the thing in the place and pull that string over there and put some tape on the stick and push that and the wheel spins and goes buzz, it’s awesome! It’s the joy of making a thing. It’s why Lego is such a popular toy.

It’s when you start out with JavaScript and realize the similarities to Python and you start tinkering just to see how similar they are. Maybe you fall in love with Python. Maybe you feel straight Java is the next step, or maybe you go low level and dig into C or Assembler. Regardless, you can choose which way you want to go. In this day and age, rarely is there a point where what you made can not be moved to another platform in SOME way shape or form.

Why are there people out there so religious about their choice of language or platform? So jealously defensive about the way they feel things should be done? If there is any argument I have for Apple opening up its platform it would be this: Stop making development boring.

The more these beardy thinky-men are ARGUING over the politics of this shit, the less I wish I’d spent the last decade embedding myself in the business. Every time I hear a pro-apple or pro-Flash argument now, especially retarded shit like this; THAT is what makes me worried about the web as a platform.

More plugins man. More non-standard bullshit. Bring it on. Let’s get this diversity party started.

Some players want this Internet game to stagnate in the ankle-deep murky lukewarm waters of HTML/CSS/JS. For those about to rock that shit, in all honesty, I salute you; You are true, professional masochists.
For those about to raise that flag and proclaim it the future however; come over here, Buzz Killingtons, so I can punch you in the collective mouth, and I’d be honestly surprised if any of you have any real development experience; You’d know how much greener the grass can be.

The only player in this game that currently gets it is Google; The problem with plugins isn’t the notion of a plugin. It’s the framework, and the end-user experience. The end users people! Don’t you want to make cool shit for them to play with? Don’t you want them to open a website and be like..

WHOA. What the hell is this SHIT that’s going on in my browser window!?

Don’t you want to give them a sense of wonder?

Technology is magic guys! Why the hell are some of you so god damn obsessed with codifying it?!

As Apple show off their new poorly named bullshit device that hurts the world and further closes off technology from hacker culture (high five Steve, you’re a fucking champ), the question on many lips is “so hey, Apple guy man, if you’re intending to challenge Netbooks, where be the Flash support?” To which Apple has no valid response, and fanboys and haters roll into cartoonish catfight balls of fog and violence over the pros and cons of this decision.

The primary pro, as far as i can tell, is that hey yo, woop, HTML5 is coming, and you know that will do everything Flash does so HEY FLASH IS DYING YO GET OFF THAT SHIP WITH THE OTHER RATS CANT YOU SEE DEY RUNNING LOOL.

The wild borderline incoherent ramblings of the HTML5-as-ark-of-the-covenant crowd never ceases to amuse me. I’m first in line to say i’m happy the web is finally up to supporting a native video object. In fact i strongly prefer the YouTube HTML5 player.

But video is not what Flash is.

The big ish with HTML5 is simply that it does not and will not do what Flash can currently do, and applications written in HTML5 are web apps like any other. Web development is and has been for over 2 decades a collection of kludged up solutions and technologies working in awkward tandem. AJAX for instance isn’t a technology as much as a methodology, but consumers lap it up as though the web is actually evolving as a development platform. The platform itself grows at an absolutely glacial rate, but developers and serverside tech are getting better at hacking it.

You know that funky Chrome startup page? A few snapshots and transitions? It takes over two thousand lines of code to get that up and running. TWO THOUSAND. I have written networked multiplayer video games in that many lines. That shit is bananas, b.a.n.a.n.a.s.  How, exactly do you propose this “leap for HTML” will take over for Flash? You are delusional.

The choice here for Apple would be between Silverlight, Unity3d and Flash, three technologies in direct competition over a very narrow web market segment that HTML5 has no intention and little hope of filling; Games. The more popular choice for developers in this regard remains Flash, and with good reason. There is a huge community, the platform has reached a level of maturity its competition has to work their asses off to match, and the language offers easily portable code, good OOP tools and is an excellent springboard for graduating to more powerful compiled languages. The day i have to write a game in markup and JavaScript is the day i quit the business and never look back. Terrible languages being brutalized to perform duties they were never designed to do.

What developers like is what gets used. I challenge you to point out a good collection of small-team indie games developed using pure web technologies that have had any real impact. What Apple has done here is simple. They have barricaded themselves off from a market that challenges their business model. Don’t stoop to assume otherwise.

Dear Apple Inc.

Why do you feel the need to be such a dick? Where i come from, people who are so violently obsessed with proving their own self worth typically do so because they suffer from some sort of inferiority complex, or simply weren’t brought up right. There’s probably something freudian in there as well. I’m confused, Apple, because i remember a time when you were a legitimate underdog, and all of us who were faithful to you were so far and few between that we had to congregate in the universities and labs where you were available due to your prohibitive cost, and were absolutely stunned and delighted to meet another private owner of a Mac. I remember some of the most tightly knit communities around, because we all felt like underdogs right alongside you. Everyone, literally everyone had some nasty opinion of the Mac, of the OS or the lack of a perceived SOMETHING, and we had to stand up for you and fight for you, and in the end it made us all brothers of a sort. It felt good, you know? It felt good to believe in being right about something that others were wrong about. Even when you fucked us over again and again with worse and worse design decisions, we still believed you were the better choice. And you were!

I grew up a Mac user. The first computer in our home was a Mac IIsi, which was as much as my dad could afford, and it eventually became mine. From Crystal Quest and on, it’s where i got into computer games. Ambrosia had me covered for years; Avara, Maelstrom.. God knows how many adventure games. I had friends running 486DX2s, playing Duke 3D and Doom, laughing as i forced a 20mhz 3mb ram 10mb hd to run Marathon in a tiny, tiny interlaced window at 10fps. But my god i loved it. It’s how i got into the mod community, it’s where i cut my teeth on Photoshop, Director, Micrologic, it’s where i got into resource level modding with ResEdit. It was a damn fine computer, and i get soft around the heart when i think of it and what it gave me. Damn the commoners with their PCs. This machine was a tool. All through my childhood and early teens, i was fighting for the validity of this system, and i never once regretted a word i said. Some of my favorite tween memories are sneaking into the computer lab at my dad’s job to play networked Marathon games on their Powermacs. I still remember my Marathon serial number by heart from all the times i had to reinstall it on various machines.  ZS8KN J7RN MYGUGD6. I’ll probably remember that until age takes my memory.

Getting my very own Mac when i was 14 was astonishing, and it was a pretty big leap in how much of a flagbearer i became for you as a company. I got a Performa 5320CD, you know those with the built-in monitor? It looked like an absolute beast, but holy CRAP did it feel next gen. Every single bit of it was an absolute dream. At this point i was firmly embedded in the Marathon community, along the Marathon Map Makers Guild, one of the finest online communities i have ever seen, and another that makes me soft around the heart to recall. Finally i was on a system of my own that i could really dedicate to this work. I wanted to work with music, i wanted to work with art, and i wanted to make worlds in Marathon 2. At this point, my Mac wasn’t a mere computer. It was where i did my thing. Pretty much every fulfilling activity took place on the Performa, and i took the utmost measures in customizing my OS9 experience. That machine was MINE, and woe to the man who thought to try and invalidate it.

Magazines at the time reflected this attitude. We were fierce about our computers, because we were constantly under attack. While bigger names like MacFormat still tried to stay professional, others like MacAddict joined us in our ferocious counterattacks against this overwhelming offense from The PC Community (a nebulous and somewhat imaginary enemy). MacAddict cover CDs typically contained a video of a PC being destroyed in some way such as being hit by a car, “walking the plank” etc, and it was absolutely delicious.

But all good things must end. The end for me came when my Performa died, its warranty no longer valid, and my nonexistent teenager economy promptly ended my hopes of picking up a new Apple machine. This was before Stevie Jobs had returned, and machines were still, even at their cheapest, prohibitively expensive. You can imagine the dark night of the soul i went through when i found myself forced to accept a secondhand Windows 98 box with a busted HD on which to keep making music.

Windows 98 was an aberration of a system, and at this time, Apple was with all its warts and flaws by far the superior option. But you do what you got to do, and with time, i learned to live with a PC. Eventually, i learned to love it. Perhaps it’s the tinkerer in me that previously loved customizing the OS itself that led me to so fully embrace the through and through customization of a PC? Taking it from a hand-me-down piece of junk to something outperforming anything i’d ever owned was thrilling, and it blew my mind that i could not have done this, scrounging machines for parts and putting together better ones, on my old Mac. Of course the OS was still terrible and there was nothing like a sense of community spirit surrounding it, but for me, the 16 year old, the broken hated hand-me-down PC soon became just as valued a companion as my Performa had ever been.

In hindsight, i loved the community spirit, and i still miss it. The Windows platform has never been more than a platform, and most likely won’t be. It’s a place to do work, and whatever communities build must be built around the programs written for it. So why did we have this fierce community spirit? This absolutely ferocious urge to prove that what we had was amazing? Because what we had was amazing, and so few people got it.

So how come now, Apple, that pretty much everybody gets it, do you think you still have the right to any of this ferocity?

I’ll be frank with you. I’m heartbroken. When you were weak we fought for you, and you just stood there, gray faced, and took the abuse. We shielded you, because you weren’t the sort to fight. We’d be your frontline; you just keep being awesome. In this storm of peril and doom, you’ll survive. We’ll be your shield.

It’s hard to say that Steve Jobs hasn’t been good for you. My god he’s made you nearly unstoppable. You’ve gone from being the quiet nerdy kid in the corner to this enormous juggernaut. You have all the money, you have all the technology. You push the limits, you break new ground.

And you’ve become a friggin’ douchebag.

It’s a known constant of the universe that the underdog has an undisputed license to be an asshole. The worse your odds, the more shit you can get away with. Your odds are pretty good right now. In fact, i’ll say you’re doing damn good for yourselves. Why do you feel such a need to fight so hard? Too much.

I think your tone is wrong, and too much. You’re no longer something like an upstart fighting for survival. You’re one of the big boys, and one of the loudest and most visible. Where you are now, there is no need for this kind of adolescent behavior. You’re past that now. Watching you jump gleefully at any chance to attack the public image of your opposition has gone from being a funny sort of quirk to approaching full-on sociopathy. Your public willingness to be thoroughly idiosyncratic, while essentially a boon as a company, is beginning to look desperate.

You have become a company that is incapable of giving credit unless it reflects back onto you. You’ve become a company so obsessed with innovation that you fail to repair the fundamental issues with your product. The Finder of today is barely improved from the Finder i was using under System 8, yet your claims of OS supremacy remain furious as ever. I have no beef with your product. OSX is a wonderful system. It’s just odd that to make full use of it you must change its fundamentals, which is a feature you share uncannily with your foremost competitor. Until you have actually solved the problems you so vehemently accuse your opposition of having failed at, it seems odd to hear your cries of supremacy.

You have a history of assimilating fledgling technologies and giving them a serious facelift. You adore the notion that you brought multitouch to the world, yet forget that the technology was not yours. You have joined a worldwide initiative to bring touch driven interfaces to the forefront, but you give little back for what you take. The end result is a company that is not a good citizen. You don’t care about the city you live in. You’re more of a rabble-rouser. You seek conflict, and where there is none you create it.

Until you have a right to fight so viciously, it’d be nice if you held your tongue a bit. You’ve entered the company of others, and it’s time to be polite.

The “idio” in idiosyncratic stems from the Greek “idios”, meaning “one’s own”. It also means “private”. There is more to this game than merely standing out. Another more common word stems from idios, and i think you’re coming real close to its meaning.

I grew up with Apple. My family is all about the mac. My sister has an ibook, my parents share one of those new fancy iMacs. My first computer was an Apple IIsi (god bless crystal quest), and my second was a Performa 5320. I used to hike up to my dad’s job at the university to steal Powermac time to play Marathon in high res. Throughout this, my buddies were on Amigas, 486DX2s, Pentiums. I’m a guy, i was into games, and the Mac just plain sucked at games for such a horribly long time. This was before i got serious about music and development. We had hardware that i thought was well capable of running great games, but while we were playing isometric tile based RPGs i can do in Flash now with better performance, PC users were hitting it up with System shock.

This was admittedly in the dark (or shall i say gray) ages, around MacOS 7 and 8, when nothing worked well and Apple was going nowhere.

When my Performa broke down and i needed something for music, my dad got me an *old used Pentium 2* that was dusting down in a storage room at his work.
It was technically poorer than my Performa had been, but you know what? When you start out with a PC, that ugly metal and plastic box that weighs more than it should and buzzes like a pack of bees as big as cats, you realise the difference between a mac and a pc very quickly. When you buy a mac, that product is like buying a sports car. You don’t intend to improve on it, you don’t intend to customize it beyond the surface aesthetics and some minor functionality. The hardware is what you’ll wind up using until you sell and buy another one. A PC is like inheriting your parents’ Civic and realising that the box is just the basis. As soon as you take a peek under the hood and figure out how it ticks, everything about it makes a mechanical sort of practical sense that inspires the same kind of creative tinkering that makes Lego such a kickass toy. When you realise that what you have now is potentially *far* beyond what that sportscar your neighbor is flaunting. You can outdo him in every possible way. With enough effort you can take that Civic and make as good a car at quite possibly a fraction of the cost.

The Apple usage cycle is as follows: Buy, use, sell. Buy, Use, Sell. Buy, Use, Sell. Get the latest, use it for a bit til it’s not the latest. Sell it, buy the next new thing.
The PC usage cycle is as follows: Buy, use, replace component that isn’t up to par until you need a mobo switch. Repeat. I got my first PC in 98, and it’s sat right next to me right now, having been upgraded a multitude of times and is now doing server duty. I’m attached to this thing, i can’t just throw it away.
It’s even got that pokemon sticker i put on it in highschool on the front panel still. That thing i put time into, it’s something i care about.

The Apple cycle demands grand transactions that can dent your budget something fierce. The PC cycle is infinitely more affordable in the long run.
There’s all the reason i ever needed right there not to throw dough at an Apple product. Don’t give me the Mac Mini crap, because it’s just another Mac you can’t do squat with in the long run. My IIsi lasted longer than the mini is going to do in the current market climate.

I’m not a fan of luxury for the sake of it being pricier, and i’m certainly no fan of buying fluff because it’s got a shiny exterior and a pop brand name.
Pop open the hood of a Mac today and there is practically no reason other than OSX to be using one. The software is hilariously limited. There’s a fantastic open source community that makes a crapload of great toys to tinker with, but to this day, working in an office with 6 other mac users who are deeply into their macs, i haven’t seen a single thing on their macs that i missed on my Athlon64 aside from Quicksilver (which is fantabulous).
They lament their lack of music software, their lack of games, how buggy the finder is, how expensive the hardware is. But oh wait, then Apple drops some new fluff like that ridiculous dashboard thing, so they can go back to shouting about how fantastic Quartz and Core graphics is, even though the only god damn thing they have to show for it is a Mr Sparkle screen saver and a simple displacement map effect in Dashboard that Flash 8 can do today.

I’m not impressed. Apple drops the same functionality on the market over and over with shinier designs, bigger ad campaigns, more buzzwords.
And the same shitty hardware. You get the iPods that you can’t swap batteries for, the Nanos that BREAK under normal usage (much like gen.1 PSPs, god bless their undying souls). The finder is the very basis of their OS, and they still havent fixed the damn thing, but wait, no big dilly, there’s a watery splash effect in Dashboard we’d like you to look at.

Apple is smoke and mirrors. On their ads you get the shiny white iBooks that i’ll expect is targeted quite precisely at the Young White Female demograph.
They look so cute and pristine, but have you guys seen one of those white fluffy iBooks after 3 months of normal, careful use by people who care about them?
White finish in normal household use looks like dry toilet paper if you don’t dust the surface daily. They ship with a ridiculous amount of RAM, because you know those girls don’t know how important RAM is, right? Do you trust Apple to cut them a break when they find out they need another 512 to have the least bit of functionality in Photoshop, or to get more than 4 frames per second in World of Warcraft? Oh wait, that’s right. No 3d accelleration. It’ll run like crap on your cute fluffy pristine laptop, which is ironic considering it probably looks like a diaper by now.

Apple’s marketing of the iBook, VOMITING forth this venomous piece of shit product that’s effectively little more than a typewriter, pisses me off in more ways than i can describe. My friend paid more for her iBook than i paid for my 1.8ghz 1gb ram laptop WITH win xp pro and a dvd burner, and i feel genuinely bad for her. She feels the limitations she wasn’t made aware of every time she tries to do anything other than type words on a page with it, and i’m very happy i got to her before she spent three times the money she should have on apple-condoned RAM. She can’t even run Fallout 2 properly on her iBook, a game that went gold in NINETEEN NINETY EIGHT.

Apple drops Da Bomb. A TWO BUTTON MOUSE. But wait, it’s not two-button. It’s touch sensitive and uses some kind of wackjob sensor technology for no reason at all other than to be cool. You have to take both fingers off the mouse to right click, but never mind that, SENSORS! TECHNOLOGY! Apple adds a SCROLL BALL to their mouse.

Surely this is revolutionary? Hardly. Old news Apple, yet you market it like you invented some kind of time warp laser array that can somehow end cancer.

Is there possibly a good reason why you would pay for this useless trinket? There is simply no good reason other than it matches your pristine fluffy iBook diaper, and that’s the reason Apple counts on. They count on the user to want the product because it’s an Apple product.

Apple’s marketing targets “the individual” in a way that’s almost frightening, because if a corporation preaches conformity, it’s the house that Steve built. “Think different” is such
a maddeningly ironic slogan that serves to showcase how successful Apple’s brand of brainwashing its customers has really been. On one hand you have the rag-tag hippie rebels
of the PC community, always striving to break rules and force the limit higher. Then you have the Apple community wearing matching white and silver suits, using identical computers
playing identical games, putting their hard earned money into their buddy Apple, who after all must be right: The iBook just looks so cute, and those Apple cinema displays sure are big.

Apple users today are the antithesis of thinking differently. They are merely another niche user.

For a community that praises itself for its attentiveness to quality, they sure put up with a lot of bullshit. Every technological advance Apple has dropped the last few years have been
OSX and Apple hardware specific. They give NOTHING to progression, other than perhaps a few new buzzwords to sell Tiger. Mac users are apparently overjoyed to be surfing websites with Safari and synching their iPods with iTunes (iRamHog) and watching the splashy effects, as long as Apple feeds them new glossy logos and buzzwords every now and then to reassure them that they are on top of the world technologically. Mac users hate on PC users for “conforming” to the Gates/MS paradigm, which is like preaching to the choir, because if anyone is aware of how crud MS is, it’s PC users. We know we buy that Civic see, because we see what we can do with it. You’re the ones lacking the balls to get hands-on.

Conformity never had a clearer face than the abiding fool of the Apple customer, staring wide-eyed at the iPod nano on the front page of the new york times, because damn it looks good,
and damn it looks small, and everyone has one, it’s got to be right for me too. To buy into the Apple paradigm of subtraction, where you keep the surface as simple as humanly possible to make the interface as approachable to anyone, without at the same time considering that this paradigm may be the least bit restrictive and having a long look at the price tag of the
kajigger you’re getting ready to throw your cash at, that speaks volumes of “thinking differently”,don’t it. “Think different” means “Think about Apple as an alternative to Microsoft”. There is no political movement here, though Apple love portraying it as such. There is no resistance. You’re merely buying into a sales pitch.

Apple is out for profit, don’t you forget that one second. There is no niceness here. Ask any business that’s tried to do business with Apple, and you’ll be told of just how hard a bargaign
Apple runs. Apple offered *the* telecom operator in norway 800 iPod minis to give away as part of a marketing campaign. This campaign involved the Apple logo front and center.
Said Telecom was expected to pay full price for each iPod. Yeah, you just try running deals with the Jobs man, but you won’t get any slack. You know why? Because A.p.p.l.e is about p.r.o.f.i.t.

There is no philanthropy here. Gates has donated more to charity than anyone here is likely to make in a good segment of their lifetime. Jobs gets on stage and sells a shiny new G5, while he’s
gearing up to ditch Motorola completely.

It’s distressing that some actually take Apple’s recent marketing campaign as anything but a simple cynical attempt to gain on people’s sympathy for Rosa Parks. By doing this, Apple has ensured that they have your support in the future, because you just know that multibilliondollar corporation is just so full of niceness and yummy goodness, which you’ll keep in mind the next time you buy an Apple product, because obviously that philanthropy extends to their pricing and the customer-corporation relationship.

I’m not impressed. There is a huge number of reasons to get a Mac, but the heartwarming nature of the corporation is NOT one of them.
I heartily recommended an iMac for my parents, but i dearly wish friend had been given clearer indications from Apple as to what exactly she was getting into, and had saved up some more cash for a Powerbook,
which is actually a laptop and not some fisherprice push-toy. Apple prey on the ignorance of the average person, and i think it’s utterly detestable.

If Mac users care about their computers and more importantly their computing, they’d be giving Apple a WAY harder time than they have been.

Instead the grand majority is plain lapdog material, and it’s sad to watch.
Think different indeed.