marypcbuk

Why did Steve Jobs use the passive to talk about the patent threat to Ogg and what does that ahve to do with HTML 5 and Flash?

Anyone who's worked on any title with me knows that I exchew the passive voice; the passive voice is to be avoided. Over on our ZD blog I enjoy dissecting an superb example of why it's not as clear as the active voice and when that can be an advantage.

Adobe brought Flash to the iPhone, at least for standalone apps, without any help from Apple – after Steve Jobs famously declared last spring that Flash ran too slowly to be usable on the iPhone. At Adobe MAX last week CTO Kevin Lynch mocked ""Steve in Cupertino" but there's a serious side to the lack of co-operation between the two companies. Here's why

I got a press release about it and I like the sound of Unibind's new DIY photo album that turns a bunch of printed pages into a bound book, so I went off to http://www.unibind.com/Basic/home.html to see if I could see a picture that would make the description a little clearer. viz: "My Books makes instant hard-cover 8 ½” x 11” personalized photo albums without the need of expensive binding equipment, glue or mess.  To use, a consumer simply inserts their stack of pages with the provided front and back cover sheets.  Then he or she staples the stack of pages; places the pages in the spine of the album; pulls the yellow strips off the front and back of the album and closes the cover, which seals the albums to the pages.  Then he or she simply tears off the extra paper on the inside cover sheets at the perforation for a final beautiful customized photo album keepsake."

The site has four competing navigation tools: the buttons across the middle, the buttons up the side, the buttons across the top of the page and the scrolling images of products above them. Except that when you click an item in the scrolling images, while that item does change from wireframe to photo and a pointing finger cursor does appear, you can't actually click to make anything happen. It's Flash to make things pretty, not Flash to make pretty things an interface. And I still don't know what the yellow strips look like.