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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."
With HTML5's video, audio and canvas elements, there will be less and less need for Flash in the future on the web. It seems like Adobe is realizing this as well and has decided to move the focus of Flash from mere embedded objects on web pages to a way of easily creating full, rich and cross-platform applications for both PC's and phones.
This coiuld work out pretty well for them in the end. I must admit clicking a game together using Flash and publishing it to every major platform sounds more attractive than the more traditional ways of developing software, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thinking this.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
...they will learn something from squeezing Flash onto these embedded devices that can be used to help make the desktop edition less resource intensive.
Adobe yesterday chummed the waters around Flash and AIR as cross-platform app dev environments for mobile devices.
Literally?
Noooo. It's bad enough that Flash slows down and eats system resources in Windows, Mac's and Linux, now they want to inflict the same on underpowered mobile devices. That's sick!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Oh, I'm sorry, I though this was an argument. I'm in abuse. Terribly sorry about that.
What can you do with Flash that you can't do with html5?
I think you should perhaps go back and read the summary carefully.
You're the first one to mention open source. Unless you think the story submitter spells source in a really eccentric fashion.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
Certain projects shouldn't fork. Sun wouldn't open up Java for the longest time, because they didn't want forks of Java, and they didn't want to repeat what they went through with Microsoft.
I propose a new license that operates on a few basic principles.
1 - You can redistribute and modify the source code.
2 - You may compile the original source code, and even compile modified versions for personal use.
3 - You may not redistribute modified binaries.
In this scenario, users can compile themselves, test, fix bugs, write patches, etc. They can submit patches upstream, but upstream still largely controls the project and prevents major forks. You would still attract community developers.
I think a license like this would work well for Flash.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Sometimes a maintainer refuses to give up a project, but refuses to continue meaningful development. Consider the X.org fork.
I could be wrong, but..
Unity3d.com is probably doing what Adobe plans to already, except they're using .NET. Cross-compiling code into real iPhone applications. I haven't dug too deeply into how Unity3d is doing it, but it seems pretty clear -- you can write your code in .NET with some pseudo-alternative languages like 'Boo' (python), and it makes you a nice iPhone binary that'll pass Apple's deployment criteria.
Considering Adobe has the time, money, and smarts to do it, don't be surprised when their 'Program Actionscript for the Iphone!' system is a very tightly defined API coupled with the iPhone framework that is cross-compiling..
Before I gave up on Perl, the assertion that Parrot would be some fancy answer to everyone's programming problems by allowing you to program in any language you wanted. I somewhat scoffed at the idea, but more recently as I've been working with ARM processors and doing a lot of cross-compiling work I can understand why it's an important idea that will soon be second nature to us.
If I could buy stock in Unity3D right now I would, because those guys nailed it. They just need to scale up and out of just the 3d game market.
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.
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?
I must admit clicking a game together using Flash and publishing it to every major platform sounds more attractive
Slap it together and call it a day!
Never mind it doesn't take advantage of platform specific features. I'm sure users wouldn't care about THAT at all. I'm sure your sales will be just fine...
Sometimes easier things are just easier, not better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...and Adobe claimed they would have flash on Android this Fall.
October is here. Now they say next year.
I am not hopeful that they can get flash on Android. Possibly they are waiting for better devices so they don't have to shoehorn it into the G1, which could use more RAM, but it is what it is.
In fact, I predict, no Flash for the G1 ever. And many of the other platforms as well. Adoby wants to FUD the developers and keep HTML5 on the shelf as long as possible, since stuff like Canvas will pretty much eat their lunch and dinner if they don't watch out.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Adobe is saying that the new 10.1 version will fully offload h264 decoding to the GPU. If that works as advertised, then it would solve lot of problems involving full screen video playback on websites like hulu and youtube.
HTML5 is kindof awesome, but even the most awesome technology is limited by the number of people who can use it. Unless the W3C or Microsoft or Google or the Mozilla Foundation manage to convince the world to upgrade their browsers with the speed that Adobe can upgrade the install base of the Flash Player, HTML5 is always going to play second fiddle.
Now according to Adobe, Flash Player 10 is at 94% adoption in mature markets, and that's about... what, 10-12 months after release? The HTML 5 spec was formally named in January 2008, and the original started in 2004. Admittedly- corporate IT departments (the big evil) are as unlikely to upgrade the Flash Player as they are the browser, but if it takes that long for anything to make it into HTML, Adobe will have already had several upgrade cycles to react, improve, and move on.
Having said that: we can always return to the days of browser specific web sites, and that'd force people to upgrade: "This website is optimized for [Insert favorite browser here], please change your browser".
This signature can save you $400 on your car insurance!
Really, I've yet to hear a serious answer to what you can do with flash that you can't in modern javascript.
People have been complaining about the lack of 64-bit Flash for four years now. If Adobe develops this plan with just as much passion as they had for x64, it'll be 10 years before we have to worry about it.
That's all I want from Adobe. Please please please please please!
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The reason SVG isn't/wasn't a workable solution is that IE doesn't support it. That's not an issue on mobile devices.
Let's say you're work for a small business or non-profit and you have, say, four licensed copies of Adobe's Creative Suite products. When you bought them, the current version was CS62. Several months later, you've decided there's value in providing these tools to another employee. That's right, you want to give Adobe another $500-2500, depending on the product(s) included. Sorry, Adobe is now at CS63, and they won't sell you CS62 anymore. What's more, the two versions are "sort of" compatible. You can import one version into the other, but all elements may not translate properly. Nope, if you want to add another user of their software, you have to purchase another full license and four upgrades in order to keep them all at the same version!
Did you get a lot of life out of your Photoshop installation but finally decide to upgrade? Great! Check online for eligible upgrade versions. Hooray, it's listed! But wait, when you attempt to install it, it won't accept the license key from your old version of Photoshop. It turns out Adobe's installation path for your version is to call customer service. [insert dead horse about how ridiculous it is to punish your paying customers vs. pirates by forcing them to activate] So you get Adobe on the phone. "We're sorry, in order to upgrade your version, you're going to have to uninstall the product, then reinstall it again with a special command line switch."
Personally, I will avoid Adobe products wherever there is a viable alternative. Adobe chooses to follow the Microsoft example of exploiting dominance in a sector by putting their customers through bullshit those with a choice would never put up with.
Has anyone else tried to use Flash/Flex to do anything more then just a game/animation? The frameworks are at best immature. While the Flex language is "ok" (basically just ECMAScript), the libraries, tools, frameworks, and most everything else that goes with it are just abysmally bad when compared to any other modern language (Java, Obj-C, Python, C#, etc).
The Flex Builder plugin for eclipse only supports Eclipse 3.3, which means modern plugins won't work. The flex compiler itself is slow and hard to setup. Oh, and the tools only officially support Windows and OSX. The documents are horrible and only give you most simplest of use case examples, but this might be because most of the frameworks breakdown when doing even remotely off the "rail" they have defined.
Just as a quick example of something inexcusably broken, the ComboBox that comes with Flex doesn't have a set selected by value function. You can only set by index and by label... which is just crazy when you consider most ComboBoxes contain localized strings order alphabetically in that local.
As a development environments go, I think you would be hard pressed to find something worse for development than flex.
And I could go on about how bad the user interaction is by default. But you really have to see that one to believe it.
No, it doesn't.
There are basically 4 cores that ARM Ltd. sells - the ARM9, ARM11, Cortex A8, and Cortex A9. (I'm leaving out the various little features of each, and going with general family). It's an easy mistake to make, but an ARM9 doesn't hold a candle to the Cortex A9.
The Cortex series of cores are the latest and shiniest, being that the core difference between the A8 and A9 is that the A9 supports symmetric multiprocessing. Note that many chips on the market today already have multiple ARM cores, but they are not setup for SMP - the secondary ARM core is often a coprocessor to do certain tasks. Common examples are multi-core SoCs used in cellphones - you have a powerful ARM core powering the general OS, and a lighter-weight one for the baseband side. Or an iPod, where you have one core powering the UI, and another doing the AAC/MP3 decode.
Still, I hope devices with embedded flash use something like FlashBlock. Nothing sucks worse than surfing freely then hitting some crappy flash ad that causes the whole system to virtually hang as the CPU is spent doing the ad and no CPU is left for the UI...
I was amazed when I saw current Flash player (10) could play "futuresplash" the original flash files all fine even with added hardware acceleration.
To have such backwards compatibility without adding bulk to a plugin which is in version 10 is the true secret why web designers love flash.
Here is the futuresplash demo from 1995 http://www.4dm.com/files/tech/blue.htm