Somewhere, Steve Jobs must be smiling. That’s because today, Hell froze over and Adobe finally waved the white flag of surrender on its efforts to bring Flash to mobile devices. Pretty amazing when you consider it was only a year and a half ago that Jobs penned that famous “Thoughts on Flash” meme which helped get the ball rolling for Adobe getting more behind HTML5. While mobile device owners savor a moment of victory, here’s what else is making headlines this Wednesday, November 9, 2011.
See that little pie chart above? It’s bad news for Nintendo (in green) and Sony (in grey) as they watch their portable game market here in the U.S. rapidly erode, with the combined forces of iOS and Android (in blue) growing from 19 percent in 2009 to an estimated 58 percent just two years later. Those are the findings of a new Flurry report, which claims that “no industry has been more impacted by digital distribution than video games,” with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android leading the charge with “free and inexpensive games, distributed across a massive installed base of powerful and networked tablet and mobile phone form factors,” potentially disrupting “billions of dollars of game revenue” from the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS systems. Sorry, guys, your $40 game cartridges just can’t compete with the low cost and instant gratification of the App Store...
If you collect DVDs, CDs, video games and/or books, you may have already discovered Bruji’s great Pedia apps for the Mac: DVDpedia, CDpedia, Gamepedia and Bookpedia. This week, the company has pushed out version 5.0 updates for all four apps with a wide variety of new features and changes, and Bruji is also offering a limited-time Mac App Store promotion to celebrate. Whether you’re an existing user looking to upgrade or a first-time buyer, each title is available on the Mac App Store for only $12.99 (normally $18.99 each), which is only a few pennies more than the company charges for upgrades direct from their website. Bruji also promises the return of Pocketpedia, their iOS companion app which got booted from the App Store in a dispute with Amazon, who provided a lot of the raw data for the apps. The company has gotten around that dilemma by creating Doghouse, their own media server “built by and for Pedia users.”
According to a report from Taiwanese website DigiTimes, Apple has notified the suppliers who make parts and components for the iPhone 4S to slightly slow down the factories and “delay part of their shipments” from the fourth quarter of 2011 into the first quarter of next year. The 10 to 15 percent reduction appears to be partially due to shortages of key components, but the report also notes that “sales of the iPhone 4S have not been as strong as those concluded in the pre-sales period.” You mean like the one in Hong Kong, which one analyst says sold out in a record 10 minutes flat? Seems strange to us...
Following a report this morning on ZDNet that Adobe was about to announce the end of the line for mobile Flash, the company made it official on their blog: Development for the mobile flavor of Adobe Flash is over, and the company is shifting its focus to HTML5, a year and half after Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ famous missive “Thoughts on Flash,” which raked Flash over the coals. “We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations,” Adobe announced today. “Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.” Could the move have something to do with the company just laying off more than 700 employees this week?
There’s been a lot of love/hate over the years between Apple and the tree huggers over at Greenpeace, but more recently it has been primarily a love-fest. The company just released its November 2011 Guide to Greener Electronics, where Apple ranks fourth with a 4.6 out of 10 rating -- a big five-place jump up the charts for Cupertino. “Apple is now a joint top scoring company on green products and relatively strong on sustainable operations, but scores poorly on energy,” the guide notes. Apple is topped by HP and Dell in the first two positions and by Nokia in third, who dropped two places.
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