doubleplusundead

aliceaitch says:

Are you an Android person or a Mac person? Do you prefer Safari or Chrome? That’s a lot of what it boils down to. Now that Angry Birds is available for Android, there aren’t many applications at all that are available on the iPad that don’t have a comparable application for Android. Many Android applications use an ad model or are very cheap. A friend of mine insists that it’s the same case with iPad, but I know my husband has paid for many of his iPad apps. (And since he’s home, I went ahead and asked him – he says that there are more worthwhile free apps on Android, but the apps you’d have to pay for do occasionally come up for free for a period of a day or two, and there are feeds you can subscribe to to get alerted when they go free.)

If you visit sites that use Flash, you won’t be able to see the Flash on the iPad. And it’s likely you never will – Steve Jobs froths at the mouth when Flash is mentioned, because it’s a way to divert attention from applications that only run on Apple products since Flash is cross-platform. Jobs has insisted that Flash is dead, and if it’s not he’s going to do his damnedest to kill it. HTML 5 and Javascript are likely going to make Flash not nearly as relevant as it used to be anyway, but there’s a difference between “here’s another way to do it” and “you can’t do it that way at all anymore”. (This sort of thing is a big part of why I will never be an Apple fanboy – Steve Jobs has too many temper tantrums where he picks up his ball and goes home if you won’t play by his rules. It’s one thing to buy a company and Borg it, it’s an entirely different thing to run them out of business.)

To deal with this, Adobe has released a way to compile Flash so that it turns into Javascript – but this kills one of the things that was appealing to developers to use Flash, the ability to provide a compiled file that, while it could be reverse-engineered, you had to know how to do it and be aware enough of what you were doing that you knew that what you were doing was likely morally wrong.

In some cases the lack of Flash is a blessing – annoying Flash ads don’t show up either. Flash has been available on Android since Froyo. iPads don’t necessarily behave the way you’d want them to with Javascript, either. You can get around both these issues on the iPad, though, by remotely accessing a PC (for example, using LogMeIn.com) – run the Flash/Javascript on the PC but access it from the LogMeIn page in your browser.

The major downside to using an Android tablet (again, this is according to Teh Hubby – I’m such an Android fanboy that I see this as a lovable quirk rather than an issue) is that Android was developed for use on phones and hasn’t quite made the jump to being a tablet OS – there are formatting issues on some columned webpages, for example. Teh Hubby thinks that they’ll have all that ironed out within the next two OS releases, though.

Did I ramble enough?