Yesterday evening I wanted to bone up on the racing rules in sailing after having had a close encounter while rounding the leward mark last Thursday (which elicited quite a blue streak from the skipper of the other boat). I really wanted to see some animations of different situations that one might encounter to test my understanding of the rules. After a quick search I wound up on the UK Halsey site, only to remember that I was on an iPad and none of the animations would work because they are in Flash. Apple is definitely on the wrong side of this! Globally there must be millions of hours invested in educational content that is in Flash, much like these sailing simulations. Yes - at some point it could (and maybe even should) be rewritten in something else, but until then, I can’t wait for an Android tablet.
Speaking of Android, I love Google’s move to make Android programming accessible to everyone. I will get my kids onto the App Inventor ASAP and will likely get them Android phones (now that they are going away to sports events by themselves having phones actually makes sense). This will be a stark contrast to their iPod touches on which they are consumers only. With App Inventor, they can create mini apps in a way that they are familiar with from programming Lego Mindstorm Robots. There are some good questions over at Read Write Web about where App Inventor will go, but it is the principle that matters. Google is trying to make it easy to program Android, betting that there will be a huge number of devices and very large number of people who want to develop for them, whereas Apple is taking a very restrictive approach, even removing Scratch from the app store!
Apple is still in an excellent position but at least for our household I currently see more Android than Apple in the (mobile) future.
