Blog | mechdrew

If anything has bugged me more about the iPad announcement than the iPad itself, it would be the constant moaning and groaning from the blogosphere and its commenters (Download Squad article, I’m pointing to the comments section primarily) about the general lack of Adobe’s Flash Player on any iPhone OS device, including the iPhone (duh), iPod touch (I just barely got one of these about a month ago) and the aforementioned iPad. Adobe has been after blood ever since the iPad announcement, and even went so far in their smear campaign to “accidentally” include pornography in one of its screenshots to try to justify the need of Flash on iPhone OS.

Are we being serious, folks? You want Flash, the bane of Internet design and functionality for over a decade, and you want it on your mobile device that badly? Granted, Flash provided features that were not commonly available in most browsers or media players in the beginning, but it has been superseded now by much better browsers and programs (dare I drop the word “apps”?) that perform those functions much faster and much better. And let’s not forget that the primary use for Flash on most websites today are those hideous, annoying advertisements that get in your way, make your page load slower, and require me to use tools like Adblock Plus in both Firefox and Thunderbird (for RSS feeds) just to save my sanity. You’ve got to come up with much better reasons than games and video sites like Hulu to convince me. May I point out a few flaws in this reasoning? Continue reading

I’ve know about Adium for a while. Adium allows you to have an instant message (IM) chat with most major chat clients such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Windows Live Messenger (MSN), Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger. If you are familiar with Trillian you have a good idea what Adium is all about. Another cool feature about Adium is it can also connect to Facebook Chat and, in the latest beta releases, can update and track your Twitter account. It’s kind of like a Swiss army knife for instant messaging.

I just barely got back into the craze of online chat. Years ago my family and I used Yahoo! Messenger to keep in touch with my brother while he served in Iraq. We were on dial-up trying to video chat, but it worked okay. Since then I haven’t had much use for instant messaging, but recently I found it useful for collaborating and tech support. Since I started using Twitter yesterday (yes, yesterday) I found the beta helpful for tweeting from the desktop without needing another app or browser window open. The beta is really stable, so if you want to enable Twitter support visit the Adium Beta page to download the latest release. And remember: it’s free!