[via Daring Fireball] Apple can hardly avoid controversy these days, and now a brouhaha has developed over a section of their site promoting HTML5 and how the Safari browser is using it.

This is a continuum of the fight Apple has been having with Adobe over rejection of Flash on the iPhone/iPad platform. By emphasizing HTML5 and web standards, Apple is combating the notion presented by Adobe and the legions of Mac-haters out there, who assert that Steve Jobs’ movement away from the very proprietary Flash plugin is actually a movement toward making Apple more proprietary. Uh, yea. Right.

Here’s the rub. The HTML5 section of Apple’s website includes some cool demos, which you can’t view unless you’re using the Safari browser – the site uses a sniffer to warn you off if using a different browser. Critics have cried foul, claiming these demos would have unwitting users believe that only Safari supports HTML5, and furthermore, that Apple may even be taking credit for HTML5, which is an open standard already partly implemented in all the better browsers*

*By all the better browsers, of course, we mean most browsers that aren’t named Microsoft Internet Explorer. Read More…

For those unfamiliar with the Apple/Gizmodo circus of this past week, here’s a basic rundown:

• Apple, a company known for actively keeping products secret until launch, plans to release a new generation iPhone sometime later this year.
• An Apple employee was carrying a prototype of the phone, and inadvertently left it in a California bar.
• Another individual, who clearly knew the status and value of the phone, scooped it up. He released photos of it, which were quickly published on tech news site Engadget, and then put it up for sale.  There can be little question that his understanding of what he had was extensive, and that his act therefore constitutes theft.
• Gizmodo, a tech news Web site that operates in an extremely (read: absurdly) competitive environment for breaking technology news, purchased the prototype phone. Again, any logical evaluation of this transaction would call the act: purchase of stolen property.
• Gizmodo editor Jason Chen published a video of himself running through a thorough examination of the product. Pundits immediately began weighing in on the matter.  In large part, tech journalists and bloggers – who tend to loathe Apple’s secrecy because it makes reporting more difficult – reacted with glee that an Apple product has been “outed” ahead of Steve Job’s schedule.
• Apple requested that Gizmodo return the stolen phone, and Chen complied.  But some time later, police raided Chen’s home, confiscating computer equipment as evidence. Criminal charges against Chen, for buying stolen property, may be pending.

This is where things get silly. Chen and Gizmodo, spurred along by others in media, are calling it a First Amendment issue – with an assertion that Chen is being targeted by law enforcement for daring to publish a story about a secret product.  First Amendment watchdog groups are rushing to the defense of Gizmodo. Even Jon Stewart, the greatest contextual journalist/comedian in America, has weighed in, presenting this as an Apple getting too powerful for its own good throwdown.

Stupid.

Every day in America, there are First Amendment issues that deserve attention. The role of the media  - and in this new age, the “media” includes basically everyone – is tantamount to democracy itself, and protections on the right to properly investigate and publish information should never be taken for granted.

But journalists who defend Gizmodo by classifying this particular incident as a First Amendment matter, are virtually peeing on the structure that supports their own careers.   As John Gruber has argued, “Gizmodo isn’t in trouble for spoiling Apple’s secret; they’re in trouble for breaking the law.”  In a tweet today, Gruber points to a statement from EFF and asserts “Unless I’m reading this wrong, EFF is arguing no warrants against journalists, ever, no matter what they may have done,” and follows with this:

I’m a 1st Amendment zealot but journalists are not a special class of super-citizen with warrant immunity.

Exactly.  While I’m a huge fan of Apple products, I think it’s mostly amusing when the company’s secrecy around product launches is breached.  But when members of the fourth estate begin to insinuate that their journalistic mission trumps routine property crimes, and when the Constitution becomes a shield of advocacy for every two-bit sleezy reporting stunt, that’s just wrong.

Put yourself in these shoes: You leave your laptop under a bench at the airport, and when you return a few minutes later in a panic, it’s gone. The thief roots through your hard drive, finds some interesting information about your company and sells the laptop to a “reporter” who then digs through your files and publishes that information about your company on the internet.

Is that a First Amendment issue?  Or is it a crime, on the part of both the original thief and the purchasing thief? You make the call. My call is that the First Amendment is too important to sully with this kind of stuff.

A post on Mashable today issues an Earth-Day timely list of iPhone apps angled toward green living. I downloaded a couple of them, including iRecycle, and they’re a nice addition to my mobile smart phone.  Of particular interest are the apps that are geo-location aware when supplying content.  iRecycle tags your location and tells you where you can recycle specific kinds of items. That kind of information has previously meant a difficult dig into the vaults of traditional media. Now it is (theoretically, if not always practically) in the palm of your hands as you think of it.  Looking for a place to live, or just curious about what kinds of mess might be in your paddling path?  GreenSpace Map finds you, and plots nearby points of toxic release potential, brownfields, or (yikes) superfund sites. A little nod from the EPA in your pocket, and I sincerely mean that in a good way.

As the definitions of news, advertising and marketing continue to evolve into something far better than traditional media has ever been able to offer, location-aware mobile apps figure to rule the day.

A plausibly interesting commentary describing how airline Virgin America is in the process of divesting itself from Flash, goes radically south with this little nugget:

But Flash still dominates the web: 98 per cent of PCs have Flash player installed while the vast majority of web content – from simple illustrations to videos on YouTube whose owner Google is one of the largest proponents of HTML 5 – are built using the technology.

Unbelievably stupid paragraph.  The vast majority of Web content is text, and even if limited to imagery, the vast majority of Web content is in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format. Oh, and those videos on YouTube? Not built using Flash either. That’s just the player.

This same hack (Gavin Clarke) also refers to the iPhone as the “Jesus Phone.”  I get it. Because people who like Apple products are almost sort of religious about it. Really clever. What a dick.

Last Wednesday’s keynote announced the Apple iPad, and it produced a colossal wave of feedback in the digital (and even analog) worlds.

The Minnov8 gang dedicated their whole weekly podcast to this new gadget, and the reaction there was largely positive.  I believe it was Phil Wilson who suggested that, even if version one of the IPad lacks certain much-wanted features, the device still stands to be a game-changer over the next several years.

In the geek gadget community, reaction leaned negative.  Engadget and Gizmodo focused on what the iPad doesn’t have and doesn’t do. Still, I noticed that the gadget hound sites, which were blasting insults full-force on Wednesday and Thursday, are quickly walking back, making certain that search results going forward show summaries that are more wait-and-see than the earlier point-and-laugh. Why are they doing this? Look no further than a brief, Slashdot review from 2001 of the iPod, in which Apple’s then-new mp3 player was dismissed as “lame.”   Ooh. That stings.

Read More…

As 2010 approaches, rumors continue to circulate that Apple will soon roll out a tablet device, sort of a hybrid between their laptop computer and the iPhone/iTouch line.  Newspapers and magazines are watching this scenario closer than most, as some believe that a page-sized mobile device represents a better-than-ever way to display digital content.

Apple’s track record is one of polished usability, simplicity, and performance, so count me as one who believes that if any company can turn a tablet device into a new standard, it’s got to be Apple.  There’s even speculation now over whether the new product has a name. A few more weeks or perhaps months will tell if this is all the result of mere gossip, or Steve Jobs’ next big stamp on modern communication.

I truly like the idea of a tablet. Ever since Amazon brought out the Kindle some three two years ago, I’ve looked forward to a theoretical device, larger than a smart phone but sleeker and simpler than a laptop. For the majority of Web browsing, it could be ideal. If properly done.

Whether tablets are a cure for print media revenue woes, though, is another matter.

Jack Shafer at Slate points out the variety of reasons why the tablet computer – and some recent impressive demos from Sports Illustrated and Wired that are clearly based on tablet computing -  are likely another mere hype-wagon for big media companies to climb aboard.  Shafer’s brief history of big-media forays into digital distribution doesn’t throw a wet blanket on the tablet as savior, but it certainly puts the whole idea into a reasonable perspective.

Time Warner famously squandered millions on the mistaken belief that its ultimate Web portal should be populated with the magazines it published. The site was called Pathfinder.com…… That’s not to say that the tablet has no future. It’s just if the past is any guide, the future of the tablet won’t look like the SI or Wired prototypes—any more than Pathfinder turned out to be the future of the Web.

It’s nothing new.  Media companies tend to get exhiliarated by anything that preserves their established methods while mapping them onto a new medium. Problem: the evolving audience isn’t nearly so attached to those established methods.

Still, the concept of media organizations as curators can’t be ignored as a means of connecting long-held skill sets with the expectations of digital natives.  I’m intrigued by this conceptual video from Bonnier R&D. Eschewing the “page-flipping” gizmo that is so often used in presenting PDF-style editions – a gizmo that ceases to be interesting or useful after approximately 20 seconds – this model promotes free-flowing, nearly page-less technology.

Moreover, as Jason Kottke astutely observes, the demo video itself is innovative in the sense that narration and video aren’t automatically co-mingled.  It’s true, we don’t always need to be told what we’re seeing.

In the runup to a new year, blogs and other social media are flowing with speculation on where journalism goes in 2010, and where technology goes.  These tend to be separate discussions. I continue to believe that certain individuals will find ways to bridge media and tech with innovation that is, above all else, useful to its audience. And they’ll do so by focusing as much on what to leave behind as what to include.