As the dust was settling from recent Adobe / Apple skirmishes (relating to Flash and the iPhone/iPad devices), Steve Jobs issued a lengthy “blog post” about Flash on Apple’s site, and this seems to put another nail in the coffin of Adobe’s iPhone packager.

In case this is news to you, to review:

1. Apple’s Safari browser on the iPhone/iPad excludes the Flash plug-in.  Apple makes valid arguments against having Flash run on it’s devices, as well as questionable ones. Occam’s Razor: Apple needs to gatekeep the apps/games to guarantee revenues through their app store.

2. In an end-run move, Adobe created a “packager” for the Flash IDE that would let Flash developers output an iPhone-native-bytecode version of Flash apps.  This is not to be confused with running flash (or swf files) on the iPhone in the browser, or AIR apps, either. Adobe took a huge risk and produced a pretty astonishing piece of code translation software. I’ve tested it and it works pretty well, especially for simple “apps” or games.

I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to leverage TimeGlider’s code base (written in Actionscript/Flash) to create an iPad version of TimeGlider. I was on the home stretch of re-working code so that it could be tested with Adobe’s CS5 Packager. Within days of Adobe’s launch of the CS5 line (which includes the iP packager) Apple made it clear that Flash IDE-created iP apps would likely be kept out of Apple’s app store.

I’ve been looking closely at Javascript frameworks that can really achieve what we need for building a good timeline, and I’m even looking at the MIT Simile timeline widget as something that could be adapted and used in lieu of Flash. There isn’t an equivalent to Flash yet respecting key criteria for TimeGlider. Flash is especially good (albeit less so on the Mac) at animation and other high framerate features. The Javascript platforms are catching up: When JQuery or Sproutcore or Capuccino produce frame-oriented features and good visual IDEs that make development easier, Flash could be in trouble. Meanwhile, I’m sure Adobe is working on Dreamweaver to be the IDE for these platforms.

Just this morning, there’s news of Flash running “flawlessly” on a Google-Android tablet prototype.  There’s every indication that the Android/Flash partnership will evolve nicely.  My vote is for Adobe to transform as much of AS3 into a Javascript library and marry it to JQuery DOM selectors.

Thanks to TG user Steve Duncan (and other earlier feedbackers), I finally embarked on creating an importing system for iCal (Google and Apple calendars mainly). From the Plus tools, you’ll be able to sync multiple calendars onto a timeline, each calendar with its own assigned icon. The first stages are mostly complete: a decent parser of the iCal format, and a little management tool for adding/editing.  Now, if there was only a way to build “importance” into this… Stay tuned for more developments about calendars. After this, a better way to sync timelines to RSS feeds…

To be frank, we at TimeGlider (formerly Mnemograph) has made very few efforts to promote ourselves. About two years ago, we sent out invitations to about 30 prominent education technology bloggers telling them about ourselves, and have done little else since then.  Strictly through word-of-mouth (delicious, twitter, blogs, etc etc) we’ve grown to having about 12,000 users. That’s pretty small by most standards, but a nice number when one considers it to be “organic” growth. It’s a clear testament to the power of our current networking and broadcasting tools.

Most recently, we’ve caught the attention of Mashable, the New York Times, and the BBC:

In September ‘09 we were featured in a Mashable article on novel writing tools:
http://mashable.com/2009/09/16/write-novel/

Just before Christmas we appeared in the New York Times education section:
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/from-00-to-10-defining-the-decade/

And we got the new year off with a bang with some fabulous coverage on the BBC’s ‘Click’ program, including a very nice video segment (about 1/2 way through)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8443401.stm

So thank you to those of you who’ve helped spread the word.  As I’ve said, 2010 promises to be a year of leaps and bounds.

On August 8, 1809, John Quincy Adams wrote, “Thick fogs all day. No observation. Saw a Schooner. Read Langhorne’s Life of Plutarch, and began with Theseus.”  You can now follow Mr. Adams’s 200 year old musings (twitterable versions) by following him him on . . . Twitter thanks to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (www.masshumanities.org) also has a nice daily dose of history, at their “Mass Moments” site: www.massmoments.org.  Today’s moment, from 1765: “Boston Mob Protests Stamp Act”.  MassMoments publishes their “moment” on an RSS feed, too.

Many recent TimeGlider sign-ups have found their way here from Dick Eastman’s prolific daily (+)  newsletter about history and genealogy: Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter. If you’re a family historian, it should certainly be in your bookmarks.

On the more mass media side, the History Channel has a daily dose of history (which comes with a dose of commercials) here.  Today’s piece mentions the East Coast blackout of 2003. I was in Brooklyn, NY. With no lights or electric stoves, and on a very hot night, I hung out with our neighbor, drank beer, and roasted hot dogs over a camping stove out on the sidewalk. Thousands of others were out likewise all across the city. The biggest blackout in recent history was also the biggest block party.

Wanted to send special thanks to all the people who have been writing in recently to report bugs, suggest features, and so forth. We’re a very small development team and we really do rely on the dialog we have with our users. A number of you have recently reported bugs and then helped in the testing of solutions. So: Thanks to Alyssa, Llonard, Steve, Josie, and others.