Slashdot Mirror
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
...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.
With HTML5 not being supported by MS, and only certain codecs being supported by Apple, the video tag isn't worth shit, unfortunately.
Besides, flash video players are all about the bloat - look at youtube/hulu, you've got captions, annotations, ads, menus at the end, etc.
I haven't looked into the other new tags, but flash for video should have died years ago.
Last I checked embed src="file.ext" worked fine, and my browser loaded a plugin/full app to handle whatever it was. (Though it's not actually part of the spec, is it?)
It wasn't pretty, and it just played the video. But that's all I want. Sadly, everyone else loves "teh web 2.0" and demands all the bits and bobs.
We've had streaming protocols for ages that worked directly in the browser, or by opening up a media app. We can always improve the protocol and the codec without touching flash.
The problem is it's not about the content anymore. The content is the lure. No one wants to serve up site.com/videos/video1.mp4 through straight html. They want you to go to site.com, see ads, click around, add comments, see a list of related and sponsored videos, and maybe watch the actual video.
This is why flash (and similar) will live on, regardless of the alternatives.
Flex. The Flash platform is split into 3 camps right now, Video, Entertainment, and application development. HTML5 really only threatens the video category, but HTML5 doesn't offer the solutions needed to accomplish the fun promotional websites like you see for video game or movie websites, nor does it offer the framework and debugging support needed for rich application development like Flex. Building high quality and reliable applications in DOM and javascript only can be a torturous proposition.