Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones)
Just as importantly, Apple and Steve learned not to rely on someone else’s technology. PowerPC and all that (when Motorola stopped keeping up with Intel and Apple suffered)
Look at things through this lens and their behavior over the past decade makes a lot of sense.
"Share music the old-fashioned way: with iMessage stickers”
Inspired by a music teacher friend who wanted to text music to his students, and Apple's new support for kitten stickers, I came up with this:
A toolkit for music notation: Lay down a staff, then decorate it with notes, rests, slurs, and more. I added guitar fingerings and tabs, time signatures and more.
Learned a lot about musical notation and stickers and seems to be quite popular in Europe for some reason.
I have a lot of little side projects. My greatest monetary success helps solve a real problem so I'd suggest that. It's not about making a living — I love when people use my stuff. Here's my experience:
> I made a stamp calculator for any postage for my own use then shared it online. It's all organic traffic via google searches and lots of repeat users. One google ad that pays for my server and a few meals a month. A Pennsylvania post office uses it to help the Amish! I love that. http://fancyham.com/stamp_calculator
> Helvetica shirts for font nerds like myself: Lots of sales at first through Twitter, but nothing now that the fed has passed. Other folks copied the idea, too. http://fancyham.com/shirts
> Geiger counter app, secretly controlled by pressure on the screen, that always drops jaws but just a few sales a month. http://fancyham.com/#detecto
I do UX design for a living and while these are fun creative outlets and an opportunity to try some programming, I think of these as play, not work.
Though I'd like to say these projects bring in money via boosting my day job, I don't know if that's true. These are such quick and dirty projects that I haven't mentioned them on my resume.
Though, I have been inspired recently by Nadja Buttendorf's 'brutalist' HTML site: http://nadjabuttendorf.com/ I'm going to embrace the ugly.