I’ve been watching the ongoing saga between Apple and Adobe, where Apple’s new products do not, and often cannot, support Flash websites.  I fully understand Apple’s reasoning, and personally I avoid sites that have too much Flash on them, but there are lots of people such as my wife who enjoy artistic and fashion sites which are often the heaviest users of Flash.  When she uses her iPhone or borrows my iPad, these sites render poorly if at all.  Frustrated users are no good for the IT industry as a whole.  I just looked at the new Mac Air laptops, and Apple is no longer including the Flash plug-in out of the box, though at least for now they are permitting users to download the Flash plug-in.  Doesn’t help with iPhones and iPads, of course.  Well, today there’s news that Adobe has a new server technology that will ship out Flash when the user’s browser supports it, and will ship out HTML5 when it doesn’t.  If this new technology works, it will make life a lot better for Apple users.

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We all have more information coming in than we can digest, so I’ve been investigating various ways to visualize data.  There were a couple of excellent Ted videos on this topic, but I just wanted to highlight a few that are catching my attention right now.  First, one that I’ve been using for a while, is a data visualization tool that shows you where space is being consumed on your Windows hard drives — WinDirStat.  It’s free, and ought to be built into Windows, Linux, OS X, and everything else.

Another tool that I find very useful on my iPad is FlipBoard which basically turns your Facebook and Twitter feeds into a magazine format, resolving links, and turning the firehose into something actually useful.  I’m a big fan of pre-fetching links, and that’s basically what it’s doing.  One of the founders is Evan Doll, the guy who was the main instructor of the iPhone developers course at Stanford (available on iTunesU).

And over at TechCrunch, something new is coming called Qwiki.  This takes the FlipBoard one step farther into the realm of video.  It’s still in private alpha right now but this is the wave of the future.

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Nobody makes a really good tripod mount for the iPhone 4.  Luckily, this guy shows you how to make one yourself for a few bucks: http://www.lifeisaprayer.com/photography/2010/diy-10-iphone-4-3g3gs-tripod 

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If you live within about 200 miles of Vandenberg you should be able to see the launch of the:

first orbital mission of the Minotaur IV rocket in support of the Air Force’s Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) satellite, also known as SBSS Block 10.  The Minotaur IV rocket is the latest in the family of highly reliable, cost-effective Minotaur launches that Orbital Sciences has developed for the U.S. Air Force.  The SBSS mission will be the 18th to be carried out by Orbital’s family of Minotaur vehicles over the last 10 years.  The previous 17 missions have all been successful.  The Minotaur IV launch vehicle is based on decommissioned Peacekeeper rocket motors that Orbital has upgraded and integrated with modern avionics and other subsystems to produce a cost-effective space launcher based on flight-proven hardware.  Subject to final preparations and favorable weather conditions, the mission will originate from Space Launch Complex-9 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA, with an available launch window from 9:41 to 9:55 p.m. (PDT) on Saturday, September 25, 2010.

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I can’t talk about much of what I do at work.  I’m sure lots of other tech bloggers are in the same situation.  Sure would like to know how they balance the need for confidentiality against the desire to share all the fascinating stuff that goes on in our industry!

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