Life without Flash, as bad as you thought?

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As a ColdFusion developer and aspiring Flash/Flex developer I was pretty upset with Apple's decision to exclude Flash support from the iPad. I promptly went out and bought the first Android 2.2 phone I could in protest! I don't regret that, I love my Droid X. However, a couple months back I was gifted an iPad. My wife and I both got one. I don't care how bias you are, you can't argue with a gift.

As much as I want to dislike this stupid thing, I just can't. In fact, I love my iPad. It hasn't left my side since I got it. Aside from Flash, I haven't found anything I can't do with it, and iOS 4.2 cleared up some of the small annoyances I had with it prior to the update, primarily multitasking.

My biggest surprise is that the lack of Flash isn't as earth shattering as I thought it would be. I think I can count on one hand the number of times either my wife or I have been inconvenienced by it. Granted, it was a pretty big inconvenience. But the number of them have been small.

This is just my experience. I'm sure there are other use cases out there, so I'm curious to know how my fellow Adobe community iPad owners feel about the lack of Flash? Is it as bad as you feared? Worse? A few inconveniences? Or maybe you don't own one strictly because of it? Let me know.

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Does a good PDF reader for Android exist?

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I want to get an Android tablet. I've been looking at the Notion Ink Adam for months now. I think it looks like the strongest Android tab to hit the market in the near future.

Last month I was given an iPad as a gift. Despite it's lack of Flash, multi tasking (which I hear is being fixed this week?), and all the other goodness found in Android, the iPad does most of what I want, very well thanks to the apps.

One of the things I do is read a lot of PDF e-books. Mostly stuff like Adobe documentation or text books with a pdf version on the companion CD. The iPad does this well, even the free iBooks app which is what I use most makes reading PDFs a treat.

On my Droid X I've tried a few readers, including Adobe's official reader, and from my experience... they all kind of stink.

Adobe's official reader is pretty good for small documents. It's quick and smooth but doesn't remember where I left or allow me to even set a bookmark which is a problem with 600 page e-books.

Beam reader trial just seems clumsy. It would rather bounce at the bottom of the page than continue to the next one. In text view you can't even get to the next page by flicking. There seems to be some sort of glitch in PDF view where the pages that were loaded into memory already start to look like TV static. It does seem to remember what page you exited on though. The $10 price tag seems high to me as well considering the bugs.

The quick office reader seems pretty OK. The bookmarks let you easily jump to chapters and you can manually input the page but it doesn't remember what page you exited on or allow you to create a bookmark.

There are some other pay options but I can't see paying for an app that may not work. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind buying apps, but I do mind buying apps that don't work. At some point I'd like to start developing for the Android so this would be a good project but until then, anyone have any input? Loading the last page read is a huge thing for me.

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Apple and what used to be the best e-music service ever.

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So, I just finished watching Apple's music event. They talked about new iOS updates, iPod updates, iTunes 10, and iTV.

I tuned out most of it, except for the iTunes part, hoping to hear how Apple took advantage of Lala's streaming technology. I have yet to find a music service that offers what Lala had. Web songs for $.10, MP3 for $.89 (often less), social networking, discovery, full album previews, enormus selection, it was such a great service.

Sadly, it looks like the only thing they've taken from Lala so far is the social networking. iTunes 10 has a "Ping" feature that is basically facebook for music inside iTunes (not the web). Follow, be followed, share, discover, etc.

This doesn't mean iTunes won't eventually be a streaming service and offer what Lala had, but unil then there's a huge void in internet music services. Too bad google didn't bid for it more aggressively.

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