And so the whinging starts…

The early adopters bought their iPads with a defiant stance towards flash – (ie: “who needs it” “I always block it anyway” “Flash is the past, HTML5 is the future”).  Add a few weeks, the iPad purchase compromises are forgotten and the trash talk and slagging has started about anyone who dares still have a flash site online.

Never mind that the online audience for iPad is statistically non-existent (0.03% of web traffic).  iPad owners know they matter more than the rest of us, they are the loudmouth spoilt children of the internet, with twitter-paced attention spans.

The economic and practical impossibility of HTML5 at the current time also counts for nought.  The guns are out, Steve Jobs has declared Flash dead, any website owner who has not found the resources in the past month to eradicate decades of all but ubiquitous flash use from the internet is now a fool to be spat on.

The other day it was luxury brands, today it is Toy Story 3 – from Jon Gruber, of Daring Fireball, along with the almost inevitable “oops” retraction and carping non-apology.  Gruber’s favoured journalistic approach is to publicly humiliate first, ask questions later.

None of its the iPad’s fault, its the hapless website owners who presumably must develop every site twice (once for the internet, again for iPad) or else fund an app in the app store for every flash feature they create.

For heavens sake guys, if you want to view a flash site, just use a device that can view flash, enough with the grumbling.

UPDATE Macworld has a whole piece on there being no satisfactory office tool options on the iPad.  Being actual journalists, they had the fairness to actually lay some of the blame the iPad for that one.  Another great read is the usability testing of the iPad – not exactly magical.  Ironically, they say using Apps is rather like using the internet in 1993, before the lessons learned by early flash and image maps developers.

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