Steve Jobs and Flash

As i read statements from Steve Jobs about Flash Lite and Flash yesterday and that it will be not supported on the iPhone or iPod Touch i have to shake my head. I have always thought that Jobs is a technological and design visionary in his field.

But maybe he has a little Flash-phobia?

I read about a statement, where Steve Jobs said, he did not understand why YouTube is supporting Flash and not Quicktime. As we all know, for the users, the popularity of video on the web is not depending on which player we publish for, it demands on quality and simplicity of the environment. The major advantage of Flash-Video-Web i can see, is the fully customizeable UI, the seamless integration into the browser and maybe the most important, it simply works.

In the past 2 years i have bought nearly every iPod, Apple was selling, because for me the iPod stands for great design, simplicity and lifestyle and last but not least, the greatest UI ever seen. But what is about the software you need to work with. To call by name, i am talking about iTunes and QuickTime.

If you are a heavy user of both worlds(Windows and Mac based PC’s) like me, you can’t ignore the diffent product politics of both. Everyone berates Microsoft for their closed environment by design strategy. But have a look at Apple’s most popular tools. iTunes is simply annoying. On my 1 year old PC(Dual Core 2,4GHz with 4GB of RAM) iTunes is so slow, that i never want to listen music with it and because i use a x64 Windows system(XP Prof) my iPod Touch will never synchronize with my library.

Isn’t this annoying?

I want to work with my PC AND have some media on it and not to have to make a decision between one or the other. Next problem is QuickTime, for sure, everyone in the media branch supports quicktime for interoperability, but have a closer look at what some agencies do. They are publishing QuickTime showreels on the web, even non-optimized ones.
As a windows-user you get a 50% chance of a browser-error (especially with FireFox). Is this ok? I think it’s not and it goes as far as i try to skip every page where this creepy QuickTime logo appears.

For my point of view, this kind of logo representation during the initialization process(which tooks terribly long for Java and QuickTime, browser freezes and so on) was always a reason why Flash RIA’s looked more seamless to me.

If i would know it better, i would say, Steve is a little bit pissed that he is not the inventor of the most popular and advanced interactive-platform-solution of the 21. century. As everyone could read in the news, at least 30% of all iPhones are cracked. For me it’s clear, people want to have the freedom about which applications are on their Micro-PC’s. I would recommend Steve to open the iPhone and iPod touch for developers and integrate a Flash-plugin into the great Safari Browser. iPod touch is the first mobile-device i really use to surf the web and if it supports flash, i promise, their will be developed some great applications for it.

Steve and Apple should not depreciate the Windows world, we love your great devices and want to get the max out of it.