Adobe’s chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, has posted a defense of Flash technology to the company’s blog area. Lynch’s comments are aimed at criticism of Flash as a technology absent on the iPhone and iPad.

“We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen,” said Lynch.

Lynch didn’t provide further details about what cooperation Adobe needed to make Flash work on the iPhone OS platform.

It was quite the week for Apple, first with its best-ever earnings and then the launch of the iPad.

While Apple didn't create this category of device, it did answer the fundamental question of why this form factor needs to exist. The meta lesson is that the story told is as important as the hardware, software and services being sold -- and while everyone may not be convinced, I do think Apple will win over the majority of a skeptical audience with high expectations.

But there's also four important lessons that Apple taught the market this week, as it enters a space that's been mostly a failure.

Overlooked in much of the hype about the iPad announcement was a comment by Steve Jobs in the Keynote presentation where he mentioned that the iBooks app for iPad would take advantage of the popular EPUB format for electronic books. Since we're all going to get a lot more familiar with this format in the near future, we felt it would be a good time to provide our readers with more information about EPUB.

EPUB is the same format used by the popular Stanza app for iPhone and iPod touch. It's a free and open standard format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and it's designed for reflowable content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. The IDPF has championed EPUB as a single format that can be used by publishers and conversion houses, as well as for distribution and sale of electronic books.

The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. It supports digital rights management, something that's sure to warm the cockles of the hearts of publishers, but there's no DRM scheme that is currently specified as part of the format.

The iPad models that come with Wi-Fi and 3G will let users choose, on a month-by-month basis, whether to pay AT&T for 3G data service at one of two service levels. The unlimited plan is $29.99 per month, just like the iPhone's data fee; the 250 MB per month plan (combined upload and download) is just $14.99 per month. Will that suffice?

Despite 100 percent year-over-year iPhone sales growth in its most recent quarter, Apple saw a 1.5 percent decrease in smartphone market share between the third and fourth quarter of 2009. This, according to an ABI document seen by the Wall Street Journal, came despite a 26 percent growth in the overall smartphone market during the same period. Although total market share dropped, Apple did sell 18 percent more iPhones in the fourth quarter than the third, according to the company's fourth quarter earnings report.

To say that Apple did poorly during the quarter would be inaccurate—instead, while Apple did well, the overall smartphone market did better. Coincidentally Apple's last drop in smartphone market share occurred in the fourth quarter of 2008, leading us to believe the drop may be related to the holiday season and customers giving less-expensive smartphones a shot in a poor economy.

Apple has released iPhone OS 3.1.3 to provide a couple of performance improvements and address several security threats. Changes include improved accuracy on the iPhone 3GS's battery level display, a fix for a bug that prevented some third party programs from launching, and a fix for an issue that caused application crashes when using the Japanese Kana keyboard.

Also eliminated are three security vulnerabilities that could lead to application crashes and arbitrary code execution after playing maliciously crafted audio files, viewing malicious crafted TIFF files, or visiting a maliciously crafted FTP server.

Lax security screening at Apple's App Store and a design flaw are putting iPhone users at risk of downloading malicious apps that could steal data and spy on them, a Swiss researcher warns.

Apple's iPhone app review process is inadequate to stop malicious apps from getting distributed to millions of users, according to Nicolas Seriot, a software engineer and scientific collaborator at the Swiss University of Applied Sciences (HEIG-VD). Once they are downloaded, iPhone apps have unfettered access to a wide range of privacy-invasive information about the user's device, location, activities, interests, and friends, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

In a talk scheduled for Wednesday at the Black Hat DC security conference, Seriot will explain how an innocent-looking app could be designed to harvest personal data and send it to a remote server without the user knowing it.

Hot on the heels of Fujifilm's 30x optical zoom camera announcement, Olympus rolled out its high-zoom heir to the SP-590 UZ's throne.

The 30x optical zoom Olympus SP-800UZ (28mm to 840mm; F2.8 to F5.6) offers the farthest-reaching telephoto end of any fixed-lens camera we've seen; the just-announced Fujifilm Finepix HS10 also serves up a 30x optical zoom lens, with more coverage on the wide-angle end (24mm to 720mm).

The 14-megapixel SP-800UZ also offers dual image stabilization (sensor-shift and digital) to steady high-zoom shots, as well as manual controls, 720p high-definition video capture with HDMI-out, a 3-inch LCD, motion-tracking autofocus, and a one-shot panorama mode akin to Sony's Sweep Panorama feature.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the iPhone OS's lack of multitasking. That is, the iPhone OS can only let one app run at a time, and this is a frustration for many people, myself included.

The introduction of the iPad has led to an increase in this chatter, largely because the assumption is that this device, too, will be limited to (essentially) running only one app at a time.

To be clear, the iPhone OS supports multitasking just fine. It shares its core with Mac OS X and obviously that runs multiple apps without any concern. The iPhone OS is no different, and many apps DO run in the background including Phone, Mail, Safari and a few others. The problem is these are all Apple's apps, and no third-party apps have been granted permission to do this.

Photoshop.com Mobile for the iPhone and iPod touch adds a variety of photo borders.

Adobe has announced an update to its Photoshop.com Mobile app, offering new features to iPhone and iPod touch users. The free application lets users edit and share photos via a simple intuitive interface.

Version 1.1.021 adds a new sharpen tool, support for a variety of photo borders, and—for U.S. users of the app—playback of video hosted on Photoshop.com.

If you’re unhappy with your DNS, whether because of performance, ads, or security, there are things you can do to improve it.

The first step is to test it. A great free tool—Namebench—can help. The software runs a series of lookup tests, using multiple DNS services (including the one you’re using now), then produces a report to show you which ones delivered the best results.

The second thing to do is switch to a new DNS provider. As Namebench will show you, there are several such alternatives. Let me focus on three of them

Since the Olympics are less than 10 days away now, it’s only fitting that we have an Olympic themed website of the week.

Uh ya, that’s it.

Wonder if she felt a draft? LOL!

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I find it especially ironic that — while Apple has succeeded in implementing a level of control over the iPhone OS that would have seemed unimaginable back in 1984 — so many people not only accept this control but applaud its virtues.

The irony is that back in 1984, the Super Bowl ad for the original Mac used a 1984 metaphor, heralding a Macintosh that would break the chains of the Big Brother oppressor. Here in 2010, it is Apple that might be viewed as the oppressor (yes, I am taking dramatic license to exaggerate here, but bear with me). Not exactly as a Big Brother, but more like what Neil Postman wrote in the forward to Amusing Ourselves to Death:

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."

No, I don't believe the iPad or iPhone will "ruin us." Hardly! But I do believe there's a message here worth contemplating.

Apple is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times.

If Mr Jobs manages to pull off another amazing trick with another brilliant device, then the benefits of the digital revolution to media companies with genuinely popular products may soon start to outweigh the costs. But some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.

Apple issued an update late Monday that supposedly fixes issues with the company’s 27-inch iMac display.

According to notes provided with the update, the fix “updates the display firmware on 27-inch iMac systems to address issues that may cause intermittent display flickering.”

This isn’t the first update Apple released to fix the issue. In late December the company released the 27-inch iMac Graphics Firmware Update 1.0 that updated the graphics firmware on ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards

Dvorak identifies the three things people are grousing about: There's no stylus (who the hell thought there would be a stylus?), there's no camera (I do, at least, get that one, even if it's not a "deal-killer" for me), and it doesn't run Mac apps (this one is just plain stupid).

He added, "These three gripes are just the beginning of a litany of complaints from the fact that it cannot run two programs at once or it has no telephony capability."

Doom! Doom I tell you!

Think about the following scenarios and whether you'd want a tablet or a laptop: airplane seat, a quick check-in to re-read a PDF before a meeting, hotel room, sitting on the couch, coffee shop, your desk. For me, the only place I prefer the form factor of the laptop is at my desk in the office because it gives me a real keyboard and props up my screen. Even there, though, I often just wind up using an external keyboard anyway, so I don't really even care as long as I have something to hold the screen up.

Give me the functionality of my MacBook Pro in a tablet form factor and I'm a happy man.

Apple is selling a product. They've chosen to keep it closed for demonstrably reasonable benefits. And—yes, okay!—several collateral benefits that come from controlling the marketplace that services their products.

But Apple is not the government. There's no mandate to buy an Apple product except the call of excellence. And if you think the average persona on the street doesn't recognize both the ups and downs of buying into an Apple ecosystem, you're eyeing them with the typical nerd myopia, looking down your nose with the same autistic disdain you cultivated in high school. Turns out the internet you helped build as a sanctuary ended up a great place for normal folk, too.

Consider a path that will truly inspire the coming generations of tinkerers and engineers: Working your ass off to make a product that competes with Apple on every count that matters—design, ease-of-use, a simple marketplace, customer satisfaction; you know, everything—and does it with the open-source licenses and values you claim to believe in; or fight to change the broken copyright laws that demonize the tinkering in the first place.

The iPad won’t kill the computer any more than the graphical user interface did away with the command line (it’s still there, remember?), but it is Apple saying once again that there’s a better way.

Regardless of how many people buy an iPad, it’s not hard to look forward a few years and imagine a world where more and more people are interacting with technology in this new way. Remember: even if it often seems to do just the opposite, the ultimate goal of technology has always been to make life easier.

Apple on Monday updated iTunes, the company’s music and video software.

Among the changes in iTunes 9.0.3 is the ability for the app to now remember your password when making purchases. The update also addresses problems with syncing some Smart Playlists and Podcasts with iPod.

The updated version also Resolves a problem recognizing when iPod is connected and addresses issues that affect stability and performance, according to notes provided with the update.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work."

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organizing the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

The more, the better. That’s the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the “wisdom of the crowd” and “open innovation.” Assemble all the contributions in the digital suggestion box, we’re told in books and academic research, and the result will be collective intelligence.
Related

Yet Apple, a creativity factory meticulously built by Steven P. Jobs since he returned to the company in 1997, suggests another innovation formula — one more elitist and individual.

This approach is reflected in the company’s latest potentially game-changing gadget, the iPad tablet, unveiled last week. It may succeed or stumble but it clearly carries the taste and perspective of Mr. Jobs and seems stamped by the company’s earlier marketing motto: Think Different.

So, here it is - the device we've been waiting, theorizing, speculating, thinking about for almost 6 months...what are your thoughts? Is it what you expected? What you wanted?

LMAO! This is the real iPad:

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This week on Your Mac Life, sponsored by 1Password, Ambrosia Software, SmileOnMyMac and Circus Ponies - "Apple Event and Macworld Expo News!"

Live Video is on Your Mac Life thanks to MacOSG.com! You can watch the show live at this URL:
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Make sure you listen in this and every Wednesday evening from 5:30pm to 8pm PT or from 8:30pm to 11pm ET, for the most fun you'll have listening to your Mac.