Jobs Has Spoken

Most likely you've heard by now about Steve Job's open letter about why their mobile devices do not support Flash, and why they don't intend on changing that. Everyone and their mother has an opinion about it, but I still couldn't resist posting a few quick thoughts I had while reading it.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

I generally really like Apple products. They really know how to polish up a beautiful user experience, probably better than any other company I know of. So while I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a fanboi, I will say that I drool heavily over most of their devices. Yet despite my generally positive view towards Apple, even I have to admit I found it funny when Jobs was calling out Flash for being "100% proprietary". It's true of course, but Apple has little room to talk.

Performance and Beauty

By now I'm sure that most of you have heard about the recent announcement by Google that speed is officially a factor in their rankings. This seems to have caused a little bit of panic amongst some people in the web community.

One web guru who you may have heard of, Jeffrey Zeldman, posted an article on Sunday wherein he describes the choice he feels designers are now faced with:

So now we face a dilemma. As we continue to seduce viewers via large, multiple background images, image replacement, web fonts or sIFR, and so on, we may find our beautiful sites losing page rank.

It's a fair enough point to make  - sometimes a designer will need to make a decision between additional aesthetic effects and improved performance (but not that often). What followed in the comments was disturbing though - many people were actually viewing Google's move as a negative thing and seemed to be very worried about it's effects.  Some felt Google was simply abusing their power, others believed they'd have to sacrifice good design in order to receive a decent ranking. The situation, I think, needs a little diffusing.