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Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push
nerdyH writes "Adobe yesterday chummed the waters around Flash and AIR as cross-platform app dev environments for mobile devices. It promised runtimes for several popular mobile OSes, including WinMo, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Android, with future RIM/Blackberry support hinted as well. Moreover, it reiterated its commitment to the Open Screen Project, an Adobe-led industry group that, if you deconstruct its name and look at its membership roster, appears tactically focused on enabling hardware acceleration of Flash/AIR on devices, as part of a larger strategy of making the runtimes ubiquitous as UI development frameworks for essentially every computer-like device with a user interface."
What can you do with Flash that you can't do with html5?
Tie yourself to a vendor
Presumably, if Adobe doesn't establish Flash as a cross-platform dev environment for mobiles, then Microsoft will manage to foist Silverlight as it's own bloated slow lane for mobile devices. And the same devs that give us IE-only web apps will start producing Silverlight-only stuff for mobiles.
Now maybe Miguel would disagree, but I think it's better to have a truly cross-platform bloated enviroment than to have a single-platform bloated environment (I assume Silverlight/Mono is at least close to Flash in bloat). Sure, I'd take streamlined before bloat, but cross-platform trumps streamlined.
By the way, aren't Android apps based on Java? Since when is that a paragon of efficiency? Or does Google use some kind of 'compiled to machine code' Java variant? Likewise WebOS apps - aren't they largely Javascript? Who said mobile device platforms weren't bloated already?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Except for the Adobe part.
And that Flash thing.
What can you do with Flash that you can't do with html5? Have your application run across many mobile devices, if Adobe has their way.
There is no technical reason that we can't have an open source, widely accepted standard for displaying animations and multimedia content over the web. We don't need a proprietary application such as Flash any more than we need one for displaying HTML.
However, Adobe has a lot of momentum and clout. Meanwhile, the browser developers can't even agree on a single standard for embedded video. The "Open" Screen Project is a big push to extend the life of a closed source, locked down technology. If most mobile devices support Flash, and html5 support is spotty, most developers will use Flash. If most developers use Flash, most mobile device makers won't be too concerned about fully implementing html5.
We have an opportunity right now to see html5 and other open standards take hold, but it is also an opportunity for Adobe to extend their grasp. I hope that real openness wins.
Forgive me if I don't trust a company that can't write a plug-in that will give me less than 80% CPU usage (480p) on my brand new Macbook Pro. The Linux and Windows version are also glacially slow, and resource hogs. Frankly I want less Flash, not more. If Adobe can't get their shit together on the 2nd largest OS platform, how the hell are they going to get it working well on a teeny mobile ARM core?
There is no technical reason that we can't have an open source, widely accepted standard for displaying animations and multimedia content over the web.
Good post, but the most important factor isn't even a "technical" issue.
Flash's real strength is on the content-creation side, and the fact that most Flash is generated by "designers" not "developers". All the HTML5 specs in the world won't displace Flash if they require a team of Javascript/SVG gurus to use. There needs to be designer software on the same level as Flash, and that's not a trivial problem.
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