Predictions for 2010

[Anon84]

     20. Adobe CS5 makes biggest splash in the “Objective-C 
     is hard, here’s another way to make iPhone applications”
     space.

This can be pretty big. Specially if Apple releases the fabled iSlate with an iPhone-like OS (although I hope it's a touch based feline). All the little flash games and apps out there would suddenly become deployable in Apple hardware and Steve Jobs would all of a sudden get a gazilion more developers (for free) to help him push all of his lovely hardware.

[cubicle67]

There's still a number of factors this depends on before it becomes big.

I'm guessing how it will work is the iPhone apps will consist of an embedded (in the app) flash platform that just plays the native flash code. This will require Adobe to build a native flash player that doesn't suck

Flash devs have to be willing to get a Mac and pay Apple their $99

I'm guessing (again) that Flash based games won't be able to have the same performance as native ones. The Flash player need to be able to be fast enough for some decent games that people will be willing to pay for

The iPhone UI is quite different from kb + mouse based UI, so most things will require a bit of a rethink regarding how the user interacts

[maxklein]

I heard the frame-rate is les horrible! 12fps for very simple flash games when running on mobile platforms. Maybe the tablet will run flash better, but I don't really see Apple having much of an interest in enabling this.

[adatta02]

doesn't Adobe all ready have a LLVM backend to target the iPhone from ActionScript3?

[cmelbye]

The Droid is hands-down the best non-iPhone phone on the market.

Huh? I just tried the Droid tonight at the Verizon kiosk, and I found it slow and confusing. HTC Sense on the HTC Hero is better by leaps and bounds.

[ramchip]

Now let me put on my troll face for a minute.

My Sharp SH001 has an autofocus 8.0MP camera, GPS, TV receiver, microSD card port, flashlight, bluetooth, infrared emitter/receiver, internet & emails (via cellphone network), built-in japanese & english OCR and QR code reader and misc apps (GPS maps, train planner, dictionary, banking, alarm, calendar, etc). Of course it can play music/videos, install apps and do what a phone does. All that for a flexible contract (costs me 15$-20$ per month, I email a lot, do a little internet, but almost never call) for 2 years and the phone itself is free.

Sure, there's no WiFi and the user interface is sometimes frustrating. But I'm not impressed by the iPhone. What makes it so great? The usable interface and the app market?

Sorry for the trollish post. I have a hard time understanding the hype for some american phones when a generic, free phone in Asia has better specs and decent design. Why don't they import them back home? :/

[joshu]

I just got a Droid recently. I'm reasonably happy with it (I was die-hard Blackberry user.) I am thrilled with the Verizon network coverage etc. The software has rough edges in places but feels like it's moving pretty quickly.

Disclosure, I work at Google. Not on Android, though.

[alexgartrell]

the Samsung moment has all of the features of the droid (including a superior slide out keyboard). I love mine and haven't had any battery life complaints.

[bugs]

Are Dropbox and GitHub wanting to get acquired?

[pjhyett]

We have no reason to sell GitHub, the business is doing very well and we're all having a great time.

[mad44]

I like this one: Bonus: RSS faces death as filtered content recommendation systems on social services emerge. They, along with most real-time startups, struggle to find a revenue model (in 2010). People almost get enjoyment out of claiming “RSS Is Dead”. The main problem with completely switching off RSS and on to Twitter is that there is a lot of noise – not to say that RSS isn’t noisy either, but it’s at least generally focused. The complete switch for me will occur when a service can leverage the vast amount of data collected by these social services and curate it in to a personalized feed just for me. Companies and investors are bullish on the real-time space, and I expect to see this service come to light this year. That being said, It is unclear to me that real-time content services have any significant revenue advantages over almost-real-time services. Accordingly, I don’t predict any services will figure out a way to monetize the added value of extreme recency in 2010.

[SandB0x]

I just don't get this. My RSS reader automatically receives articles from sites I like, or subsections of sites I like, and in most cases the entire article is fed through to my browser/phone in a nice readable format. Perfect.

I don't see why it's broken and why we need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe I haven't subscribed to sufficiently noisy feeds. Can someone explain?

[nir]

RSS is infrastructure. It doesn't die. RSS readers as we know them might go away, but RSS readers are just a way to consume it, probably not even the best one.

RSS will likely stick around for quite a while, transparently powering features & products that's don't have "RSS" anywhere in their name.

[thwarted]

I don't understand why anyone expects RSS, the transport and encoding format, to contain filters, recommendations, and social aspects. Where do you think all those people who post (shortened) links on twitter get them from? Visiting all the websites by hand? How many of them are retweeted without actual having visited the site and read/consumed the content? Can sub-140 characters contain enough information to allow the next level of filtering, social or otherwise, to be really effective?

[icefox]

There are two rss readers 1) Feeds of slashdot and 500 other urls leading to 10,000 "news" items a day.

These stories are stuff you would like to read, not that you must read. This might die as it is just overwhelming and it will be replaced with filtered/recommended content.

2) Specific feeds of items that don't come up that often or don't have that much content where every post must be read.

This will never die. This is extremely valuable. Subscribing to a blog where the author posts every six months, subscribing to information about a bill going through congress, subscribing to a feed telling you whenever someone assigns a bug to you, a feed notifying you when someone posts a FooBar up on ebay (once every 8 years). Whenever you want to get notified about something and you will read every story rss is extremely good. The alternatives are you manually checking (time waste) or email (spam heaven).

[jsz0]

AT&T/Verizon/Apple: Apple's affections change quickly. In a span of about 8 months we had Jobs cracking jokes on Intel to Paul Otellini on stage in a bunny costume at an Apple event. If Verizon & Apple cannot reach a deal I suspect we'll see the CDMA iPhone on Sprint instead. Is there anything Sprint wouldn't do to get the iPhone?

[icode]

All of these predictions are so vague, one will never be able to judge if they are right or wrong.

[10ren]

A few of these are predicated on an improved economy, which is probably right.

[_3ex7]

> 10. Square realizes its bottleneck is additional hardware, so it gives card reader away for free.

Isn't this what PayPal was originally trying to do back in the day? Interesting concept.