Dan Frommer:

But the reality is that the mobile browser is the future of the web. So anyone who is using Flash today for anything should start working on a plan to eventually stop using it.

This is another reason the ending of Flash is good for the future of the Web experience. Here’s an example: Say you go to a campaign page on Kickstarter from your iPad. The Kickstarter website knows you’re on an iPad and so the campaign video is served up in HTML5. However, say you’re on your Flashless MacBook Air and you go to that Kickstarter campaign page. When you go to watch the video, you instead get an error message prompting you to install Flash.

As I mentioned earlier this morning, I had this same experience with the HP TouchPad. If I disabled Flash, websites wouldn’t serve me HTML5 video, but instead would tell me that I need Flash.

Here’s hoping that the change Adobe is making will have an effect beyond the mobile browser and onto the desktop browser. (Which would be ironic because one of they’re stated goals for ditching mobile Flash is so they can improve Flash on the PC.)

John Gruber:

Apple didn’t win. Everybody won. Flash hasn’t been superseded in mobile by any sort of Apple technology. It’s been superseded by truly open web technologies. Dumping Flash will make Android better, it will make BlackBerrys better, it will make the entire web better. iOS users have been benefitting from this ever since day one, in June 2007.

This is the proper perspective. Adobe’s ceasing of mobile Flash player development will hopefully be a boost for the continued advancement of mobile browser technology and therefore the enhancement of the mobile experience, no matter the platform or device.

Matt Alexander writing at The Loop on why mobile Flash was never as great as advertised:

Hardware manufacturers continue to tout Mobile Flash’s relevance. Best Buy clerks try to sell you on the advantages of Flash over sans-Flash platforms. Ads flaunt the apparent benefits of a Flash-enabled web on your tablet and phone. Meanwhile, reviewers across the web grapple with its usefulness and buggy implementation. So, the question is, why has there been such prominent exposure of one feature?

Remember six months ago when the HP TouchPad was a new thing and one of its big deals was that you got “the whole web”? When I used the HP TouchPad for a week, my experience was that Flash worked better than I had expected it to, but worse than I’d wanted it to. Or, put another way: it did work, but barely.

What I found especially frustrating about Flash on the TouchPad was that if I disabled it, video sites would simply say I need to install the Flash plugin rather than serve me the HTML5 video. If I were to visit that site on my iPad the site would know I was on an iPad and would serve sans-Flash video. But it seemed they only would sniff for iPad or not. And if not, then I needed Flash.

Hopefully, websites will begin serving HTML5 video whenever it’s supported, falling back to Flash if HTML5 video support is absent.

Speaking of the MacBook Air, Erica Ogg speculates on what possible ways everyone’s favorite laptop can be advanced now that it is already so thin, so fast, and so affordable:

It’s very hard to get much thinner than the Air and still have a traditional notebook form factor. Take away too much and you essentially wind up with the iPad.

So it’s going to have to come with advances in software, in interfaces and new forms of input, like voice and touch, and the continual improvement in battery size, life, and — while we know chips will regularly get faster — how manufacturers deal with heat dissipation and battery life in conjunction with those chips’ advances.

Erica is so close, and yet so far. I think she’s right that we’ll see Siri come to the Mac, and she’s right that if you take much more away from the Air you’ll start to get near to an iPad. But she cites that as something to be avoided. I think that is exactly where things are headed. Not that the Airs will cease to exist, but that the ways in which an iPad can replace a laptop are daily become more prevalent, and the gap between an Air and an iPad is only going to get smaller — and that is all by design.

Ben Brooks on the difference between the hardware experiences of the iMac and the MacBook Air compared to the Mac Pro:

As I think about everything that Apple stands for with its design and goals, I can’t help but suspect that the MacBook Air is the epitome of the Mac experience as Apple sees it. Small, quick, sleek, low-price, sealed.

The MacBook Air and the Mac Pro are polar opposites: one a marvel of engineering — the other a marvel of brute strength.

The beloved, screen-friendly fonts, Georgia and Verdana, have been officially expanded upon. The new versions have been extended to 20 styles each and are officially ready for print. This is great news. Georgia and Verdana are lovely, and print designers who didn’t know any better have been putting these typefaces to work for years.

Based on the biography, Malcolm Gladwell profiles Steve Jobs as a tweaker. Jobs had an amazing ability to take things that had been built or invented or designed already and tweak them into something far better than the original.

If a MacBook Air were as inefficient as a computer from 1991, its battery would last a mere 2.5 seconds.

Dustin Curtis:

One of the major manufacturers—Motorola, HTC, Samsung, anyone—needs to sit down their designers and engineers in the same room for a very long time to think about every aspect of the mobile experience, and then just build a generally solid, beautiful, phone, without the gimmicks.

Up until a week ago I still had all my leftover calendars from my past job. I had unique calendars for: meetings, misc, personal, open work time, and travel. Having a different color for each time of calendar event was helpful for me to quickly scan my day or week to see what I would generally be spending my time doing that week: traveling, going to meetings, open times for working on projects, etc.

But I have no need for multiple calendars now, and so last week I consolidated them all into one. I was shocked to find out that deleting a calendar would mean all of its associated events would be deleted with it, rather than having the option to re-assign them to another calendar. You’ll cringe when you hear what I did: I spent about an hour going through all my repeating and non-repeating events for the next 12 months and assigning them to my personal calendar I was consolidating to.

If I’d had even thought about this painfully-obvious-in-hindsight suggestion form Devir Kahan I could have saved myself a lot of time, and I wouldn’t have lost all of my past events that were on those calendars that got deleted. Live and learn I guess.

My Thanks to Koombea for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Koombea is a full service design and development shop that specializes in making web and mobile apps. For the past 4 years, we’ve been using agile methodologies to build lean startups. Recently, we’ve taken our same process to public companies to keep them fast and efficient. We’re on the hunt for great new clients looking to build amazing products.

Over the past 18 months we’ve seen our clients raise a combined $50M+ in early stage funding. We’ve seen an even larger figure in acquisitions and other exits. Right now, we’re working with some amazing companies in elite tech incubators such as Y Combinator, TechStars and AngelPad, just to name a few.

We’re Data Driven, Transparent and we have serious Experience building companies and shipping products. We’ve been reading Shawn for a while and getting to know his audience. If we don’t know you yet, reach out and let’s talk!

Nice, comprehensive review of the UP by Thomas Ricker. His summary assessment is about the same as Shawn Walls: nice hardware, clever activity and sleep tracking, but poor software. Fortunately, the software is the easiest part to fix, and can (and hopefully will) be updated for UP.

Shawn Wall was able to pick up a Jawbone UP on Saturday at his local Apple store. If I had known they were out a day early I could have saved myself several hours yesterday afternoon driving around Kansas City to no avail. My local Apple store had none. Nor did any of the Best Buys in the area. About half a dozen Targets in the city had received the UP, but only a small quantity, and they were all sold out by yesterday afternoon. I did finally find a few in stock at the local corporate AT&T store. By the time I got there, however, they only had two UPs left: a small and a large — and I needed a medium. Ah well.