Dear Mr Jobs, I think its time we had a talk.

You were my first love and over the course of our lives together we have had some serious ups and downs. As a child I was brought up in a Macintosh household with a perfect little Performa 200. I later left my adolescence behind and ventured off into the world on my own. To assist me in this endeavor we continued our love with my first “real” mac, the multimedia powerhouse Quadra 650. And as all love grows and matures so did my creative needs. So our love continued to blossom into the massive Power PC 8500. It was like a new magical world opened up for me to create in. However many years later I had found a new love, an application called Macromedia Flash 3.0 and while initially this poly-amours relationship went swimmingly eventually you had concluded that Flash was just too much for your little processor heart and I had to move on to a pc. But fear not the spark of our love would strike once again with your invention of the iPod. The very first day the iPod for pc was sold there was one with my name on it whisked off to me from some small south-east-asian country. This love affair with your little musical device would last many years and would eventually turn into me owning every version of the nano you had ever made. However over 10 years later, and ironically the very same issue that caused a rift on our relationship to start with, has now brought me to get a restraining order against you. As a flash developer almost my entire professional career I can no longer be support a company that in any way is adamantly against me putting food on my table.

Mr Jobs & Apple Computer we are through, and its most defiantly you not me.

- josh

In a Nutshell:

As it reads in the above I was a prolific Mac-o-phile for many years. When Macromedia Flash came out I was completely blown away at how you could combine logic & design into 1 application. But as my love for this program grew the abilities of the mac with the program seemed to slide. This eventually led to render errors when you would output your swf file. Should the mac you are on not have enough power any jpg in the source file would come out as a grey box. (you would also get no warning that this may have occurred) Never having had this problem on the pc I made the decision to switch from mac to pc. If I had to quote a year on this cosmic event I would say around 1998. After that I was pc all the way, until of course the iPod came out. Prior to that I was one of the few U.S. citizens that used the Sony MiniDisc platform. Shout out to all my Minidisc headz!

Historically I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone that would not admit that the invention of the iPod changed the world of music forever. From the very top of the corporate music industry down to how the individual identifies the methods upon which music is visually accessed and listened to. For better and worse this industry will for ever be different. But this global iPod influence that has ballooned from its initial release in October of 2001 to now has also ballooned Apples perception of its own control. With a 100% closed system, unless you jailbreak your phone, and a DRM that borders on prisoner treatment at Guantanamo, the iPod and Apple has morphed into the Kim Jong-il of portable entertainment.

Some perspective:

Lets say your a developer and you make your “killer app” for the iPhone. Well apple needs to also agree that its a killer app. But lets just say they do and you sell 20,000 copies of it at .99 cents. Look at you, you just made $19,800.00! Unfortunately apple will be taking 30% of that. Ok so now you made $13,860.00. Oh but wait, if your a U.S. citizen Uncle Sam will want his portion leaving you with $9,702.00, congratulations your left with less then half of the profit from your “killer app”. I doubt you will ever take out Uncle Sam from this equation but last I checked Steve Jobs is not a country. (Quietly counting down the days until Steve buys Cuba and makes it iCuba.) Oh by the way, the sweetest cherry on the top of this land of Apple, he can remove your app from the store and or stop it from working on people devices at any time should he see fit.

That’s a hard pill for any developer or “freedom lovin American” to swallow. But like hundreds of thousands of others I swallowed it and at times suppository’ed it. And for some reason I had convinced myself that the function it added to my life was a well enough trade of the meager content and device control Apple demanded in return.

The Breaking Point:

At Apples recent unveiling of the “revolutionary” iPad, the same event in which Steve Jobs accused Google of being evil for doing nothing more then adding competition to the market place and Adobe of being lazy, Mr. Jobs proclaimed his hatred for Adobe and in particular Flash. I can really only turn a cheek so many times but this was the last. The Google comment alone could be its own article however lets try and stay on topic. Mr Jobs you have officially drawn your line in your magical iSandBox and I’ll be leaving it now, besides I already have an iPad Nano through AT&T, well until my contract is up and I get a Google Phone.

This article is part 1 of 2, part 2 will feature my official Zune review and usability comparison from a devoted ex-iPod user.

In related news:
- Apple Gestapo, Loose lips might get you killed
- 5 Reasons You Should Be Scared of Apple.