OSNews

Push is so 1999! The future is Lateral notification. It says it’s coming, doesn’t arrive, and then by the time you’ve forgotten about it it appears out of nowhere singing it’s own praises.

Used with an Exchange server it pushes events and mail fantastically well.

Well, flash has its place. Better that than being stuck with Silverlight as our only option. It's just too bad flash has been so misused, there is no reason for a page's navigation menu to be written in Flash, for example, nor is there any purpose to having the content of a page be flash-based unless it is video or interactive content. None at all.

IMO Flash should be a glorified <img> replacement, nothing more. I’m not discounting the technology (it was key in the 1996-2000 period). However, I think beyond cartoons the standards have everything else covered now.

Ha ha, "standards", right? Some 5 - 7 years ago, some guys still turned off JS. What is web without JS nowadays? Well, it is patched stuff over another patched stuff. So called AJAX saved web. Right - some JS libraries are hundred of KBs of crap, to delude users into thinking, they have real-time RIA :-) Wait, it is still not fast enough, even on super duper HW? OK, let's produce new browsers with new ultra cool JS engines, which are x times faster, but still not fast enough? :-)

So, before you dismiss Flash or another compact technology, just try to answer yourself, if those "standards" really have everything covered ...

Poor word choice. I meant lack of MMS being ridiculous. Every phone since the late 90s has had this capability.

Oh definitely, yah. I thought carriers and handset manufacturers were stubborn and irresponsible when Bluetooth took 2-3 years to even get off the ground, but Apple definitely takes the cake.

Trouble with the video tag is the codec problem, i.e. you don't know what codec the video will necessarily be in or whether your running browser will support it. Theora was supposed to be adopted as the standard, but as far as I know that hasn't actually happened, and Theora doesn't really seem to be going anywhere. And then of course, Apple chose not to support it, so Theora probably won't be running on the iPhone any time soon. H.264 is riddled with patents, making it unlikely to be adopted as the standard (though it'll probably end up being the most used anyway). Dirac shows promise, perhaps that will become standard.
This is one thing you don't have to worry about with Flash, as long as you have Flash installed correctly the video will play. Right now, that's its biggest strength, while it limits the compatibility to operating systems that have a flash player it usually works about the same on all of them. Doesn't change the fact that it's a buggy piece of crap, but it's more universal right now than anything else.

It's a bit unfair to say that Theora is going nowhere. Mozilla just inveted $100k into the development of it, and WikiMedia favors Theora above all else. Those two items alone make Theora something worth considering.

Now, Theora support on the iPhone, on the other hand... I agree, not happening any time soon.