CyberMonk's comments

I don't think many (outside of perhaps Apple PR?) have argued that fingerprint security is great, absolutely speaking. Relatively speaking, however, it is great, as many phone owners would otherwise not have any sort of locking security on their devices at all. Yes a fingerprint unlock is hackable, but it's a lot less hackable than your phone being open from the get go.

Replace "Apple" with "Any company that makes cameras/phones/etc." and the same point would be made. Sucks to be the big dog, I guess.

Even if the app is only around and viable for a year, if you use it every day, is it really so hard to justify spending $20 on it?

I'm really glad we have companies like Tapbots, Panic, etc., pushing against the "race to the bottom" trend with app prices that we've seen lately. Good apps are HARD to do, and there's no reason they shouldn't command a price commensurate with the effort involved.

This is the funniest headline I've seen in weeks.

It's the "iPad Killer" syndrome all over again. How many times has the iPad's or iPhone's death (and preceding that, Apple's) been predicted? And how many times has it actually happened?

I feel like every journalist who expresses this sentiment is hoping beyond hope that this time, this article, is the one that turns out to be timely and correct. But it's been a stupid bet thus far.

If you think a Linked List Item (on DF) is the same as a reference to a source article contained within an article that itself regurgitates wholesale the content of the linked piece, then you just don't get it.

If anyone ever needs an example of biased poll design... ;-)

> I'm sure that a lot of people with flash video delivery systems did not particularly enjoy converting to h.264

Flash is a wrapper, not a codec, and has in fact supported H.264 encoded video for some time. A "switch" from Flash to (likely MP4 wrapped) H.264 entails only removing the Flash wrapper, not a re-encode of the content. Apple not supporting Flash is not the same thing as Google not supporting H.264 (codec != container).

The "what" being that, assuming the ideal is a move away from proprietary technologies like Flash, supporting WebM alone in the current environment is likely to have the opposite effect (and thus hurt web open standards, at least in the short to medium term).

I too liked Chrome's support of both WebM and H.264. Theirs is a disappointing move.

True, but Vorbis is an audio spec, not a video one. Theora, which would arguably be more on MPEG-LA's radar, is used in only a handful of titles: http://wiki.xiph.org/Games_that_use_Theora

The difference being that Vorbis has almost no commercial traction. If large, popular services (like YouTube, for instance) decided to go with a codec like WebM, the MPEG-LA might finally decide to make good on those threats.

I'm surprised Gruber didn't also pose a question about the murky patent landscape re: WebM. If Google decides to throw their full weight behind WebM, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see some legal action on the part of MPEG-LA.

That said, the "Who is happy about this?" question smacks as slightly unfair given Gruber's unabashed approval of Apple's decision to not support Flash (albeit, I too support this decision as a web developer).

Addendum: whereby I mean to say that there are undoubtedly numerous users who have been "harmed" (whether they know it or not) by the lack of Flash on iOS devices (e.g., because they could not view a given website on their device), even if the removal of Flash will be good for the web in the long term.