Adobe is finally putting an end to Flash Player. They've announced they're stopping development of the mobile Flash Player, which is where the future of tech innovation is heading, and the writing is on the wall for desktop Flash Player as well. This is a good thing for a myriad of reasons, both technical and political.

However, it is important to remember that Flash drove much of the innovation on the web as we know it today. When Flash was conceived over a decade ago, the web was a glimmer of what it is today. Creating something visually impressive and interactive was almost impossible. Flash brought the ability to do animation, sound, video, 3D graphics, and local storage in the browser when nothing else could.

Without Flash, MapQuest would not have been able to provide maps for years before Google did in JavaScript. The juggernaut YouTube would not have been possible until at least 2009, four years after its actual launch. Gaming on the web, which has been around as long as Flash, would only now be possible a decade later. Flash enabled developers to create rich user experiences in a market dominated by slow moving browser developers. Even in 2011 Flash exists to provide those more powerful apps to less tech-savvy people who still use old versions of Internet Explorer.

Flash Player itself seemed like a means to an end. Macromedia, and then Adobe who acquired them, sells the tool that you use to build Flash content. Thus, Adobe's incentive was not to build a great Flash Player, but a pervasive one that would sell its tools. Its technical stagnation provided a market opportunity for browser developers to fill in the gaps that Flash provided. As a result it has a huge market dominance in tools for building rich apps for the web, tools HTML5 lacks.

This puts Adobe in a unique position. As HTML5 continues to negate the need for Flash Player, Adobe has the tools for implementing Flash within HTML5, and the market eager for those tools. Hopefully this move signals that Adobe will be moving in this direction. Because the web DOES need great HTML5 tools for people who aren't savvy in JavaScript, especially for the people who used Flash to do it previously.

HTML5 offers developers the ability to build high-performance, low-power apps and experiences. Browser innovation has never been faster; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are all competing to bring the best new features to their browsers in compatible ways. But they're just now filling in many features Flash Player has had for years. Adobe can harness this to help build a better web, and few others can. Hopefully they seize this moment.

It seems like every other week I'm reading a blog post from a person who went to a tech conference, or a meetup, or heard a talk, and was rightly offended that someone made a tactless joke about women, either about women in general or about specific women. It is disheartening to hear that any group would be made to feel less worthy of respect in our circle, especially at a time when our industry is undergoing one of the most massive and impactful revolutions in decades, and at a time when we need new blood the most. Every person in our industry should be fighting for inclusivity and should welcome new members with open arms and helpful tutorials. Why there aren't more people pushing for this, I don't know.

It is equally saddening to hear so many respectable people jump to conclusions about what your actual motives might be when trying to have an adult discussion about this sensitive subject. I'll make no qualms about it; I'm a born-middle-class white guy, so right off the top, there will be people who will read this under the pretext that I'm either a misogynist or that I'm some kind of "Internet white knight". As a middle-class white guy, my exposure to injustice and inequality has been limited. I cannot possibly know how it feels to hear words thrown around that minimize the role of women in tech. But I also have rarely been a presenter; who am I to say that I know what Noah Kagan's motives were when he put "faceless bitch" on a slide at a recent conference? He could've been trying to lighten the mood, he could have a vendetta against women in tech. I don't know.

I'm inclined to believe that incidents like this, such as where women are mocked by a presenter, are isolated events perpetuated by a non-representative group of a few people. When I go to conferences, I keep an active ear open for slurs against women, and have yet to hear any. But what's fascinating to me is how women are the group continually called out. A demographic survey created by A List Apart shows that women made up 17.8% of respondents; the same study also showed that Asians, blacks, and Hispanics each represented no more than 6% of the group (which is itself a completely separate topic of inequality that seems to be forgotten in these discussions). Yet women are the demographic so frequently mocked and shamed. It probably boils down to sex and the fact that the people that connect to this industry tend to be more introverted, but I don't know.

The only two things that unite everyone in this industry are that 1) we are all fascinated with high technology, and that 2) we are all humans. As humans we have cognitive biases which prejudice us towards recognizing things the way we'd like them to be. So when we hear that, over the course of several conferences, jokes were made that denigrate women, we're biased to believe that these events are misogynistic in nature, and that repeated incidents show a trend of sexist men trying to keep out women. It's possible that's what's happening; I think the truth is that these people generally are poor communicators and entertainers put into a role of communicating and entertaining, and failing. But I don't know.

I don't know the solutions to the problems we face, but I do know a few things that we all can do better, no matter what subset of demographics you belong to.

• Actively call out unacceptable remarks when they're perpetuated at the expense of any group within our community. Whether that's at the expense of women, men, Android fans, Windows fans, Apple fans, anyone. There is no logical reason for our fledgling industry to show animosity towards any group.
• Fight the groupthink mentality to label anyone who screws up . Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. Few people are truly evil and rotten. I'm reminded of this YouTube video on race; watch, but replace "racist" with "sexist". Address what they did, not who they are. Let's address individual problems without calling into question someone's motives, unless someone makes the same mistake over and over without remorse.
• Consider not just on how your message is delivered, but also on how it will be perceived. Your audience will contain not only women, but members of every race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Joking at the expense of other groups is juvenile and unbecoming, and will reflect negatively not only on the speaker but on the tech community as a whole.
• Mentor young people who are interested in high technology, and help them learn how to become successful and open-minded. This is something that we should be doing a better job of as an industry as a whole. A teenager who wants to become a software engineer will learn acceptance if they are accepted into a group dominated by grown-ups.

More non-middle-class-white-guy people in our industry will only benefit everyone, from developers to designers to companies to customers. We must be vigilant to keep prejudice out and embrace every single person who wants to contribute to this revolution. But we must be similarly careful not to vilify people for mistakes; hindsight is, after all, 20/20. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. I just don't know.

Be excellent to each other.

Thanks to Faruk Ateş, who has spoken at length on this issue, for his feedback on this post.

JailbreakMe.com is a website that offers visitors the ability to jailbreak their iPhone without a computer-based tether. It does this by exploiting the system-wide ability for applications to read PDF files, where an incorrectly-formatted PDF file can lead a hacker to do anything they want to your system. While this bug CAN be used maliciously to steal all the personal data from your phone, the developers in this instance used it to enable jailbreaking.

Others will tell you why you should or should not jailbreak your iPhone. Others will decry the developers for bringing to light a serious vulnerability in the iPhone OS. In this blog post, I won't do any of that, but will instead point out some things you should and shouldn't do if you decide to jailbreak.

Backup first, and backup the backup

It should go without saying that, before you start mucking around with the internals of the software on your phone, you should back everything up with iTunes. Sync down all the data into iTunes, and explicitly backup by right-clicking the iPhone in the sidebar and choosing "Back Up". Once that is done, you should backup the actual backup files to somewhere safe. This way, if you ever want to go back to a vanilla iPhone, it's fairly straightforward. The files are located in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.

Understand what you're doing

Jailbreaking lets you run apps on your iPhone that, for a variety of political and technical reasons, you could not run otherwise. Apple has gone to great lengths to prevent you from running unauthorized apps on your iPhone, and for several reasons; the most important is for security. Since jailbreaking is designed to let you run those apps, that means that in order for the jailbreak to work, several of those security measures are simply shut off and disabled. This does not mean that you'll automatically get viruses and have your data stolen, but it does open up more avenues for hackers to gain access to your data. You simply must be more vigilant and attentive about security when your phone is jailbroken.

Only add sources that you trust completely

When you jailbreak, you will notice a new app on your home screen, called "Cydia". You can think of this as the jailbroken App Store for your iPhone. You will be able to use this to install lots of apps; you can also install mods that change app icons and fonts, mods that change how apps behave, and mods that add new features system-wide. One way this differs from Apple's built-in App Store is that third parties can publish their own list of apps and mods at their own whim, and users can add those lists to Cydia. You can find lists of third-party sources available by doing some creative Googling.

Now, since you can add any third-party list you want, and those lists can contain mods which can access all of the data on your iPhone, you need to be extremely mindful of which sources you add. Seemingly innocuous apps, such as simple wallpaper lists, can contain code which subtly and sneakily siphons away your contacts, or worse. Since you don't have Apple vetting apps before they hit your phone, you won't be able to trust that an app isn't malicious if it's from an unknown source.

Only install what you need

Many of the apps and mods you can download through Cydia will not be things that you can technically do on the iPhone using Apple's published APIs. An example of this is the project which allows you to install a Growl-like UI for push notifications; it simply is not possible to do through the App Store. This means that you will have mods injecting code into the memory of other apps (sometimes into EVERY app). The more mods like this you have, the more they will start to clash with each other. This can lead to crashes, drained batteries, hangs, and system slowdown. You should consciously try to minimize the number of mods that you install, to preserve the experience of your iPhone.

Be mindful of OpenSSH

Packages in Cydia often times will require use of other libraries to achieve their goals. These needs are called dependencies in Cydia, and they will be listed when you try and install packages. There are packages which will blindly install a package called OpenSSH, which installs a server on your iPhone that allows you to log in via a Terminal. Now, this package uses a file on the iPhone to determine what the default password is, which happens to be 'alpine'. As you can imagine, many people don't change that password by default, and instead just let the default stick and never change it; this led to disaster last year when someone used the default password to extort lazy iPhone jailbreakers.

If you install this package, the absolute first thing you should do is change the root password.

Be wary of iOS software updates

In all likelihood, your iOS software updates will be far more involved than non-jailbreaking. The hacks used to enable jailbreaking are usually patched in the next update of the OS. This means that, if you want to keep your jailbreak mods, you will need to wait for the iPhone dev community to release an updated jailbreak procedure. Sometimes this takes hours, sometimes this takes weeks. Once the jailbreak is released, updating generally consists of backing up everything, restoring your iPhone to the new OS, re-jailbreaking, and reinstalling all of your jailbreak software. It is a far more involved process, on top of the already involved update process of the iOS. You will likely update the OS far less than you would if you were non-jailbroken.

iPhone had the first two store UIs; the iTunes Store for content like music and movies, and the App Store for software. The iPad will add a third, the iBookstore, for buying eBooks. These stores all provide content for users to extend the utility of their device. But each has a pretty different user interaction model for accessing, purchasing, and consuming that content.

• The iTunes Store is a separate app that is completely distinct from the iPod app. When you find something to buy, prompting you for your iTunes account password. It then adds the purchase to the app's Downloads tab. Once you have purchased the content, you must then switch back to the iPod app to listen to or watch it.
• The App Store is a separate app. When you purchase something, it prompts you for your iTunes password, and then exits to the home screen, switching to the screen where the app will live. The state of the download is reflected in the app icon. When the download is complete, you tap the icon on the home screen to use it.
• The iBookstore (the one word is the official name as used by Apple) is not a separate app, but lives within the iBooks app on the iPad. Purchasing content prompts for the iTunes password and downloads in-app, which can be directly accessed after it has finished downloading.

Each type of content follows a different workflow when going from access to purchase to use. If a goal of the iPad's low price is to drive content sales through the three stores, as some speculate is the case, then the purchase model should be as streamlined for the different types of content. Forcing different workflows will only confuse users who can't remember which type of content comes from where.

We've all got our thoughts on what the Jesus Tablet will be, so here are my guesses. I fully expect to be completely wrong on all of this, as many of these answers are completely blind shots and that Apple will blow my expectations out of the water.

Hardware

• 8"-10" touch screen, running at 1280x720
• Very thin; less than 1/2" thick (the iPhone 3GS is 0.48" thick)
• About 1lb heavy, light enough to hold in one hand
• 8 hours of battery life
• 32 or 64 GB SSD
• WiFi
• 3G over GSM, and Apple's US 3G partner will continue to be AT&T
• There will be some way to pair your Tablet cell connection with your iPhone's cell connection; either with an official announcement of AT&T tethering, or by adding your Tablet to the 3G account
• Front-mounted camera
• Some kind of collapsible stand in the frame, so the device can sit on a table

Input/Output

• Multi-touch on the display, exactly like the iPhone
• Multi-touch on the back of the device, similar to the surface of the Magic Mouse
• Photos and video via front-mounted camera
• Audio via front-mounted microphone and speakers, wired headphones, or Bluetooth
• Dock connector
• Expanded voice recognition
• Software keyboard, no Bluetooth keyboards available

Software

• It will run the iPhone OS 4.0; or rather, the iPhone OS will become a "Mobile OS X", consisting of the heavyweight Tablet and the smaller iPhone.
• It will allow multiple apps to run at the same time, with some UI for viewing multiple apps alongside each other. This may not be possible on the iPhone.
• It meant to replace a full PC for most common day-to-day needs
• iPhone applications will not run "automatically", but will need to be resubmitted through the App Store approval process. Most applications will run without much modifications. Icons will need to be higher resolution.
• A system-wide Dock for documents, applications, and small widgets will be onscreen at all times
• The home screen will be significantly revamped, and renamed to the Dashboard. App icons, web clippings, and widgets will be freely arrangeable.
• Handwriting recognition will be available for text input, with an optional stylus, or with a gesture such as two closed fingers drawing as if you had a pen.
• Some gestures will be used on the back of the device, such as scrolling and zooming.

Apps

• Standard kind of iPod and Internet communications apps the iPhone OS comes with. iTunes video, iTunes LP content, Maps, and Safari web content will look phenomenal.
• Sketchbook, an unlimited workspace to sketch and write notes, with collaboration features.
• iWork, a full port of the iWork application suite, tied to the Internet (and expansion of the iWork.com web application), with collaboration features.
• iChat, a port of the Mac app, with a heavy emphasis on video conferencing

SDK

• The SDK will be available immediately, with a simulator.
• There will be an emphasis on application interoperability.
• Applications will be able to register plugins with view controllers and UTIs. When an application wants to expose an object (say, an image) to other apps, it will look for app plugins which respond to the "public.image" UTI, load one which matches the UTI, and present the view without leaving the application.
• Applications will be able to expose services, similar to how they work on Mac OS X. Services will be integrated into the voice control system.

Product

• 32 GB model will be available for $899
• 64 GB model will be available for $999
• Available in US in March, major countries by summer
• There will not be a WiFi-only model at launch.

Other Predictions

• Updated MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, with the mobile Core i5 "Arrandale" processors from Intel.
• There will be no mention of Verizon
• There will be no updates to the iPod or the Apple TV
• There will be no announcements of the iPhone 4G