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Apple's Change of Heart On Flash
Dotnaught writes "In a blog post, Walter Luh, co-founder of Ansca Mobile and a former employee of both Apple and Adobe, recounts how Apple once promoted Flash on the iPhone then changed its mind because Flash didn't provide the optimal mobile user experience. 'I think that Apple came to the same conclusion I've come to — namely that Flash has its strengths, but not when it comes to creating insanely great mobile experiences,' he writes. Luh's piece ends with a pitch for mobile development using the Corona SDK, a Lua-based programming environment that strives to recapture the simplicity of early versions of Flash."
Adobe Flash will die rather sooner than later and it won't be missed. Now if only all browser vendors could agree on a video codec for HTML5.
"the Corona SDK, a Lua-based programming environment that strives to recapture the simplicity of early versions of Flash"
Like... wait for it... VideoWorks?
All Right, Yeah!
... to a mobile device, without using Flash. Go on, try it. I'm waiting.
For this reason, my company doesn't support the iPhone.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Interesting how Hulu (and others) provide free flash videos while the iTunes store provides videos for sale.
There isn't any reason why Flash should require a dual core processor just to barely run on the Mac. I use both Macs and PCs and the performance on the Mac side is horrible. Surely a company as large and as resource rich as adobe could have figured out how to program a flash plugin that is quick and lightweight. Is there something that I'm missing?
Right now Flash has most of the market, but my prediction is that within 5 years Silverlight will start to supplant Flash for this purpose. XAML is gaining ground rapidly, Silverlight supports DRM content for applications such as streaming movies, it supports DeepZoom, a rich set of built in controls, runs on every major OS (Mac, Linux, Windows), supports multitouch out of the box, and is very developer friendly. It's moving much faster than Flash, and while it doesn't yet have the same market share, it has enough compelling advantages that it's just a matter of time before it will become the dominant standard.
They want to fully control what you can do with an iPhone. They can't do that as well if they allow you to make arbitrary programs out of Flash.
Nothing new here, just standard operating procedure for Apple.
just an 'OK' mobile experience. You know, my standards aren't really that great, so if you give me an OK experience I won't be pissed off just because it's not 'insanely great'. Rather than having no experience at all. Just sayin'.
Flash can't work very well on a phone because it was designed for computers. Computers have an ever-present pointing device called a mouse that is used to activate many Flash elements. How do you replicate that with a pointer that only exists long enough to click on something?
If Apple really cared about empowering the user in the style, manner, and spirit of their legendary 1984 commercial, they would make Flash available -- or rather allow Adobe to make it available -- on the iPhone, Touch, and iPad, and allow the user to decide which user experiences work best for them.
Apple only cares about profits and control these days, having become the very thing they once railed against.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What about all the browser applications written in flash? Will we just not have them?
ActionScript is ECMAScript with the Flash DOM. JavaScript is ECMAScript with the HTML DOM. One major point of HTML 5 is to make the HTML DOM as rich as that of Flash, in hopes that the next version of a web application will be written in JavaScript instead of ActionScript. YouTube is one of them; if you're running Safari, Chrome, or IE + Chrome Frame, you can switch it from Flash to HTML 5.
Why can't they let us decide?!
Seems to me like the entire article was more geared for promoting the Corona SDK than to explain why Apple chose not to do flash.
"Flash has its strengths, but not when it comes to creating insanely great mobile experiences" Nothing really creates insanely great mobile experiences, mobile is far more about functionality then experience because it is such a limiting platform. Most of our clients looking for iphone apps are trying to scale down the full experience to a limited set of core functionality that supports a sometimes connected, highly relevant, supplement to the richer web desktop/laptop experiences. As much as people want to say that HTML5 richness can keep up with Flash, I've already tried to start some benchmarks to see where the performance gaps are. http://craftymind.com/factory/guimark2/HTML5ChartingTest.html http://craftymind.com/factory/guimark2/FlashChartingTest.html To give some perspective, the iphone renders the HTML5 test at about 0.5 fps.
" Flash didn't provide the optimal mobile user experience."
I say bullshit. Flash is very optimal on my Nokia n900, and a whole range of other smartphones that support it.
This post has nothing to do with Apple, Adobe, Flash or iPhone. It is just a shameless plug for the author promoting an SDK that is nowhere near being usable.
The first problem is that it's hideously slow, and bloated beyond belief. A hideous, disfigured freak of a software abortion. The second problem is a tad bigger, and, strikingly, it seems that everyone belching their thoughts on this point appear to be complete, clueless jacka**es: there is no ARM version of Flash. Let's repeat that: there is no ARM version of Flash; it does not run on any ARM based system. There, someone had to break the news to the morons.
Apple does not want a way to bypass the appstore-assrape, plain-and-simple.
...security.
Seriously - with all the active exploits out there that use Flash as a way into an operating system, I can very easily see a Flash bug being exploited to bust right through the iPhone's 'walled garden' setup (what with it's default root password and all...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Is there something that I'm missing?
Knowledge of how large companies stagnate. It's all bureaucratic BS.
I'm sure there's a team at Adobe that wants to optimize flash - but they're probably being blocked by the higher ups that refuse to cut backwards compatibility.
Flash performance is horrible on any computer. Youtube used to be smooth on my old 2.2ghz Athlon XP, but now it barely plays. Even my 3.5ghz Athlon II has occasional stutters.
How old is your dual core? A lot of Mac processor are woefully out of date. If you're running a Core 2 Duo from 2006 then I bet just about everything sucks. Also, people used to complain that Flash wasn't taking advantage of multiple cores, now it seems they complain that it does. Good old Slashdot. The Flash hate continues unabated.
meep
Touch screens support every mouse action except hover. Any action that does not depend on hover can be simulated by always moving the mouse under the touch location. What actions are you talking about that depend on hover?
> Silverlight does not stream any video to my Linux machine. Of course it should, but somehow it doesn't.
That's just a problem with your implementation. Get or write a better one.
Of course, if you don't implement DRM you won't be able to play DRM'ed content, but that's a problem with *any* system which doesn't implement the necessary DRM, not just with Silverlight. If you want to be locked out of an increasing amount of content, you are welcome to ignore the DRM subsystem. If you want to play that content, you are welcome to use an implementation that supports the DRM subsystem. It's your choice either way! You can make the choice that you deem to be appropriate for you, and I can make the choice I deem appropriate for me. That way we both have freedom to do as we wish. What a concept :).
It's no wonder that Flash which acts as a gateway to a mass of free content from across the world might be considered "non optimal". After all, Apple has to think of the poor consumers who would be "confused" by all the choice that countless non-Apple alternatives would cause.
apple likes it lock down and lock in app store and free flash games are bad for that.
I somewhat understand Apple's position, but if Skyfire can do flash on shitty windows mobile devices then it can be done on the iphone. I still can't believe after the mp3 patent fiasco that we don't have widely accepted open music and video codecs. I already don't run bloated Apple software on my computer I can't wait to file Adobe in the same cabinet I put Realplayer and Quicktime in.
Try building a Web App that allow the client to cache thousands of domain objects like we do at our company, and
you'll quickly find Flash is the only technology that works well. It's 1000 times faster than JavaScript (jQuery, GWT, etc),
Grails, Rails, JSF, etc. Believe me, I tried them all.
We can build a VERY robust web app in flex in a day that is blazingly fast for the
client, autocompletes every drop-down from massive result sets, and looks amazing (and I'm not a graphic artist).
It integrates easily with the Spring Framework, and BlazeDS removes all the old marshalling code you used to write by hand.
I totally understand why Jobs doesnt want Flash on the iPhone. It makes the app store worthless.
Who's going to pay for apps when you can get free flash ones that are just as good?
I'm just really sick that I have to learn ObjectC (something I gave up 7 years ago) to write iPhone apps.
But, the barrier to entry makes the apps I write, that much more valuable.
Senior Software Architect
So, Lua, hmm. Maybe all those hours I spent writing addons for World of Warcraft weren't entirely wasted. Just mostly.
You are happy that you cant get youtube and all the other sites that use Flash?
Um, what?
Flash -shouldn't- require anything above a Pentium III to play right. In the "dark days" of the internet Flash was about the only way that you could get anything other than -very- basic HTML to show up the same on all platforms. A lot of sites were (and are) using Flash to avoid the pitfalls of CSS and HTML. A site coded for Netscape would look like crap in IE and vice versa. As such Flash was more or less designed to provide A) Multimedia beyond an animated GIF B) Consistent layouts and C) Interactivity.
As such, Flash was/is used to provide access to things that shouldn't require more than the browser to run. With this in mind, Adobe should make sure that Flash runs nicely in all system configurations because it is now a vital part of the web (for good or ill)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If Apple really cared about empowering the user in the style, manner, and spirit of their legendary 1984 commercial, they would make Flash available -- or rather allow Adobe to make it available -- on the iPhone, Touch, and iPad, and allow the user to decide which user experiences work best for them. Apple only cares about profits and control these days, having become the very thing they once railed against.
Just look at story. "Insanely great mobile experience"???? Give me a break. I am sick and tired of this company being hailed as god's gift to design and bug free products. It just isn't true. They are one of the least open, most overpriced, most marketing based companies on the planet. Their products don't "just work". What they do is force you to work in a limited way according to their rules and in Apple's interests. Yet otherwise intelligent people start foaming at the mouth about how great Apple is and repeating their marketing drivel verbatim. It's just plain disturbing. Apple's genius is the marketing, which seems to brainwash intelligent people.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why? Adobe is not allowed to progress? How many modern applications can you run on an old single core computer? How about a computer with 128 megs of RAM? Or how about a 1 GB hard drive? This idea is such nonsense.
meep
It's not hate that drives my comment. I have a 3 year old Macbook Pro with 4GB of memory and 2.2ghz Dual Core processors. The machine also has a 128MB discreet video card. So at the very least, I'd expect flash videos to play smoothly and consistently without taxing my processors at 80 to 90 percent! Even a processor heavy task like encoding video doesn't tax my processors as much as watching a flash video. To be Fair, Adobe says they are working to make Flash up to 50 percent faster on the Mac when it releases version 10.2. It seems a bit too little too late as it will take significant improvements on Adobes part to win over Apple.
I would consider it a feature, especially since 99% of flash content I see is actually advertising (and it's literally plastered over sites. Countless flash adverts loading their own stupid videos etc. Good riddance)
There's a difference between "taking advantage of multiple cores" and "require a dual core." It's really telling when someone asks "How old is your dual core?" because a computer from 4 years ago shouldn't even have to struggle for the functionality Flash provides.
A single core Pentium 4 should be more than enough, yet Flash struggles on a multi-core processor.
I'm glad youtube is now serving videos with the video tag instead of flash.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
With all widely accepted software technologies, the customer base demands "more, more, more," and the products get fat from all the features. Flash is just the most recent 'mature' technology -- e.g., DOS, Windows, Office, Adobe CS4, Adaptec/Sonic/Roxio CD/DVD/BluRay Creator, AutoCAD, and TurboTax (originally on the Commodore64). Even Linux is starting to look a little thick around the middle. As for those that don't grow, is anyone using Minix?
I like what little insight this article provides into the issue of flash on the iPhone, but it's really not substantive enough to warrant posting here on Slashdot. What does stand out, is how much of an advertising pitch this is for Corona. I'm sure it's fantastic, but the first part of the piece seemed, to me, to simply be an advertising lead-in.
While I agree with you, that is somewhat Apple's fault. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. In Flash 10, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported on OS X because Apple does not expose access to the required APIs.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
If you are talking about video, we know why it is slow.. because Apple will not let them use hardware acceleration. That level of GPU access is limited to the OS and QuickTime. Apple feels that only Quick Time should be used for video and they are enforcing it in the OS.
So you likely have a 4 year old processor. Apple (I think) always has about a year lag in putting the chips into production from when Intel releases them. How many modern applications run super smoothly on your MBP?
meep
You bring up a good point: even some web sites that have perfectly usable, labeled buttons will show a long description of the button when the user hovers. This "balloon help" or "tooltip" behavior is by no means specific to Flash. It has also existed in HTML since at least the turn of the decade, as the title= attribute of <a>, <abbr>, <acronym>, <img>, and most other HTML elements. If a general-purpose web browser provides no way to access the title=, the web browser is broken. By this metric, Mobile Safari is broken.
Agreed that Flash needs to be replaced, but not with HTML 5.
For general "rich internet application" stuff, moving from proprietary Flash to standards-based HTML5 (+DOM/SVG/ECMAScript) should be good news for open source. The problem is not HTML 5 per se but that the only video codec that seems to be gaining widespread support in HTML 5 is the patent-encumbered H.264.
Newer versions of Flash look like shifting H.264 as the codec for video anyway (albeit with different packaging), so Flash vs. HTML5 is a non-issue on the video front.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Care to provide a link to your Flex app so we can check it out in a BlackBerry, Nokia, or Android phone?
" Luh's piece ends with a pitch for mobile development using the Corona SDK"
Duh... its a commercial blog on the Corono SDK website.
I agree totally. It should NOT require that sort of horsepower to display a freaking web page.. That is what 'web' was all about.. moving the horsepower to the servers.
As far as Adobe being lazy.. its rather appropriate since most sites that use flash are done by lazy developers.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. In Flash 10, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported on OS X because Apple does not expose access to the required APIs.
They can use the Quicktime API to decode h264. Instead, they want their own code to access hardware acceleration. Given that Flash is a popular source of trouble in OS X, I don't expect Apple to make it worse by giving them hardware access.
Having old hardware should NOT be an issue when you are hitting a web page.
And its not just flash that is the issue. The entire mindset you just displayed is the core of the problem.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Any processor built in the last decade should be able to handle most flash (certain games and h264 excluded... for processors made back around 2000). It doesn't exactly require 3 gigaflops to draw a triangle. People forget how powerful modern computers actually are, and mistake a woeful lack of optimization for irreducible complexity. Heck, a modern computer can do more work in a second than 20 people can do in a lifetime, which kinda makes one go WTF when they take >200 ms to do something.
Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.
Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on -- for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.
http://www.object404.com
Seriously.. there's always going to be dumb users. There are dumb car drivers, there are stupid firearm users.
I all for flash dieing a painful death, but Apple needs to stop being a jerk corporation and let people choose how to run the stuff they buy.
The true reason why Apple won't allow Flash to run on the iPad is the same as the reason why they won't allow any standalone emulators into the App Store: it doesn't want software running on these platforms that they haven't specifically approved. Everything else is just them rationalizing their basic prohibition on virtual machines.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Uh all of them? With the exception of the 1GB HDD, I do this every day. I'm not sure what your point is?
Even if other applications were just as bad as Adobe, that doesn't make it okay. Using 5 times as many resources as you need isn't "progress"; it's exactly the opposite of progress.
Ever used Photoshop? Illustrator? Acrobat? *any* other Adobe app besides Flash?
Large and resource-rich companies like Adobe tend to be driven by their marketing team rather than engineers, so their software tends to be a huge, bloated mess that generally does what you need, along with a hundred other features that look nice on paper but you'll never use within your lifetime and have never been optimized because the engineers are too busy hacking together feature #101, as John from marketing demanded.
Though given how awful iTunes and Quicktime run on Windows, I don't know whether Steve Jobs has any right to call others lazy.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Uh there's more than video. Please don't say Java can do the rest that Flash does, if you take video away. The strength of a platform has much to do with the strength of its "editors". The Flash editor puts much power into the hands of designers, animators and "not really developers". You just can't do this with the bare bones technologies of HTML5 + this, + that, unless or until the accompanying "editors" for creating media catches up.
Exactly. They can progress all they want and assume that everyone runs super-powerful quad-cores with 4GB RAM*. But -- most mobile devices are not that powerful. Certainly not the iPhone. And that's a very good argument for keeping Flash off such devices.
(Note that Apple isn't the only one -- Firefox on Maemo disables Flash too, IIRC.)
*More than 4GB won't help because we're still waiting on a cross-platform 64 bit flavor of Flash, thanks very much.
Go somewhere random
I have a first generation (2006) Mac Pro running 2x dual core 2.66GHz Xeons (that's four cores), 10GB of RAM, an NVidia GeForce 8800 GT w/ 512MB, and a 1TB striped RAID across 2 drives.
Everything runs perfectly, except Flash.
Are you telling me Flash needs more ponies than this machine?
The problem solved by Flash video wasnt can I show a video? Instead, Flash solved can everyone watch my video? HTML5 video doesnt provide this solution; it just adds another approach to the incompatibility pile.
HTML5 isn't going to change things unless browser vendors agree on a common codec.
Also, unless HTML5's video spec finds a way to implement DRM on video stream playback (which Flash does), studios and major media content providers who want to protect their content aren't going to bite on "HTML5 video".
http://www.object404.com
With all due respect, that's bullshit. VLC decodes Youtube's streams (saved to disk) at 13% CPU. Flash takes 90%. I don't have a graphics chip that could decode H264 in hardware (apart from being programmable thru OpenCL, to which Adobe has all access in the world). Apple not exposing any APIs (to what?) is a red herring. To me this looks like slowness in the Flash interpreter, a shoddy video codec they implemented, and pure lazyness.
If you are talking about video, we know why it is slow.. because Apple will not let them use hardware acceleration. That level of GPU access is limited to the OS and QuickTime. Apple feels that only Quick Time should be used for video and they are enforcing it in the OS.
No. Quicktime uses the API's exposed by the core-graphics system. Adobe doesn't want to use them. They want to write their own and address hardware directly. Apple doesn't allow this - for many reasons.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
With many websites you can get to the MP4 or FLV file that is displayed inside the flash player when you look at the HTML source. How come that VLC/Quicktime/whatever can play that file with my processor barely noticing, yet when I view the move inside flash, my Macbook starts screaming like a fucking jet engine?
Sure, it's the processors fault. Not.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Actually, Flash Player has supported the playback of H.264 since 2007 and Flash Player is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of videos have now been encoded to H.264 on the web (H.264 used to be mostly only used for Blu-ray, not so much web videos).
A lot of people are confused about FLV. FLV is not a codec, it's a container. The video inside is usually encoded in Sorensen Spark, On2 VP6 or H.264.
http://www.object404.com
It isn't just Flash video that has appalling performance on the Mac. Every applet is a massive CPU drain, you can't browse without noscript or click-to-flash because a couple of tabs worth of pages with Flash ads will literally reduce your browser to a crawl.
@Reda not going to rehash this too much because I said it in my other posts. Apple is not cooperating in our attempts to improve the performance of the Flash Player on the Mac. Microsoft is, and in FP 10.1 we cut the CPU utilization in half for watching video. Same with other mobile device manufactures. We would love to work with Apple to do the same but they are making a strategic decision not too so that they can increase their revenue. Hey thats business.
http://www.object404.com
That H.264 is a beast to decode, Flash or not. You will discover that many Core 2 Duos cannot play back Blu-Ray movies without assistance. High bitrate H.264 requires so much power, that slower dual core CPUs just aren't enough, even when that's all the computer is doing. It is just an intense algorithm.
Is there something that I'm missing?
er... a brain maybe. the fact that flash doesn't run nicely on the mac is more of a feature than a bug if you ask me. Until you get a real computer you deserve to be excluded from the web and it is certainly better off without you.
flash is the most distributed piece of software in history.
compare the number of idiot mac users with the number of people that have flash installed on their computers. do the math if you want to see how this tussle will end.
They have long been a "We know what's best for you," company. They decide what experiences they want to offer the user, and the user has very little choice in the matter. They tell you what you want, you just have to go along with it. If you don't like it, you go elsewhere.
That is one of the primary reasons I don't use Apple products. They don't offer what I want, and don't offer the ability to become what I want. So, I take my cash elsewhere.
Mike Melanson, the lead engineer of the Linux Flash Player team explains the technical challenges in his latest blog post, Solving Different Problems:
The Flash Player has to do a little bit more. In addition to decoding the data, it has to convert YUV data to the RGB colorspace and combine the image with other Flash elements. Then it has to cooperate with another application (web browser) to present the video to the user.
So the dedicated media player solves a problem: Generally, it plays linear media files from start to finish while allowing user interaction in the form of random seeking along the timeline. That's the most basic, trained monkey-type of labor in video playback. At most, the player might handle DVD menus.
Flash Player solves a different problem: It plays linear media files from start to finish while combining the video with a wide array of graphical and interactive elements (buttons, bitmaps, vector graphics, filters), as well as providing network, webcam, and microphone facilities, all programmable via a full-featured scripting language, and all easily accessible via a web browser using a plugin that most of the browsing population already has installed.
You seem to forget that video is not the only thing people use Flash for.
http://www.object404.com
It is so easy to do transitions, transforms, animate properties such as opacity, add vectors, audio, video in HTML5/WebKit right now, which represents all mobile usage except for mobile Firefox which is still not 1.0. What is needed is for Firefox to catch up with ISO video and CSS animations. I did Flash development since 1997, I much prefer to develop for WebKit now. You make a CSS class that defines one state of the animation, another for another state, and just change the class of the element to animate it and WebKit does the tweening in the GPU. Flash was never, ever this fast or easy or had this performance, and WebKit runs on every OS and architecture and is open source. The idea that we need something else is ridiculous. We just need more browsers to support this. But even now, Safari on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Chrome, Android, Blackberry, Nokia all support this.
Flash is PC software, it has system requirements of a P4 or better, 2GHz or better, there is no such thing as a mobile that can run it. Notice that Mobile Firefox dropped Flash in RC3 for performance and stability reasons. Adobe is using Apple as a red herring, the problem is Flash itself is not part of the Web. It has not been managed like WebKit was since 2002, totally open source, built primarily for speed and standards.
So at the very least, I'd expect flash videos to play smoothly and consistently without taxing my processors at 80 to 90 percent!
Flash is primarily a programming language, compiled to SWF. (But it has some other features as well, like a timeline and a notion of time-based actions.) Used well it produces nice, fast, very compact code - in fact, people use it to build software to run on embedded devices that would make your Mac look like a supercomputer. There are two performance culprits: 1) the VP6 codec still popularly in use; this has no hardware support (unlike H.264) and playback requires your main processors to decode. 2) poor code - the problem in this case is that people who aren't programmers use Flash to cobble together ads and other animated objects, usually with little or no QA before it goes out the door. You can't justify a comprehensive development process for something that is done by a non-programmer in an afternoon, has to be out in a few days, and shouldn't cost more than any other design work. Needless to say, this non-process produces garbage software, and when your browser loads a whole bunch of these it's no surprise it doesn't function well. ClickToFlash is your friend in the short term, but in the long term this needs to be addressed by ad providers (campaign managers).
Microsoft's Silverlight is supposed to compete with Flash. There's a FOSS implementation, Moonlight (just released stabe v2.0), that runs on Linux, and so probably fairly portable to iPhone and Android.
Can Silverlight offer "insanely great mobile experience"? Even if not, can Moonlight offer optimal Silverlight experience? "Suboptimal" has never stopped Microsoft tech from taking over, and if Silverlight content floods the mobile Web, could Moonlight become the runtime that kills Flash? Has it proven a proper Silverlight environment even on desktops?
--
make install -not war
I definitely agree with you.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Anyone who makes a site completely out of Flash should be _shot_. Repeatedly. In the face and crotch. If I'm using flashblock, I should still be able to see more than a site's copyright notification. Using flash to design a site beyond video is nothing more than ostentatiousness. First you use a little flash for an animated menu. Then you do a little more for a slideshow on the front page. Soon you're serving *all* your content that way, your site takes 30-45 seconds or MORE to load on a broadband connection, and there's a 10 second delay to navigate to a new area on the site. I expect that shit on dial-up, not a 3mbps or more connection. If you can't make a good site without Flash, fucking hire a professional or STAY OFF THE NET.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
According to CNN, Apple isn't allowing Flash on the iPhone/iPad because because it doesn't want its devices to be the best porn products on the planet.
lol
Seriously though, the article is a good read: Behind the Adobe-Apple cold war
http://www.object404.com
I suspect a lot of history behind this. I first encountered Flash back in 2000 when I started working at Spümcø, doing Internet cartoons. We were an all-Mac shop, and grumbled a lot about the fact that Flash's performance was always better on Windows machines of roughly the same power. Macromedia clearly treated the Mac as a low-priority thing, as the horrible glitchiness of the Mac version of Flash 5 showed; there was a 5.01 release that only existed on the Mac, to fix a ton of horrible crasher bugs in the editor.
So the Flash team clearly didn't give a shit about Mac performance back then. It worked half-assedly and that was good enough for them, it seemed.
This attitude did not change when Adobe bought Macromedia to get ahold of Flash. If anything, it spread to the rest of the company, along with Macromedia's horrible ideas of branding - I'm told the much-unloved CS rebranding was primarily the work of ex-Macromedia people.
So, there is a reason: it's a complicated, nasty pile of decade-old code that barely worked on the Mac in the first place, with nobody in a position of power at Macromedia/Adobe complaining loud enough to make anyone take out the machetes and start cutting their way into the underbrush to fix things until the iPad came out, and Adobe began to see all their dreams of Flash-as-platform swirling down the toilet.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Funnily enough (though slightly off-topic), iTunes runs like a dog on my dual-core Windows XP machine at work, with the UI frequently freezing for no apparent reason. It's not so bad that I don't use it of course (but then I have to, nothing else will access my iPod), but it does make me wonder what it's doing to act like that.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You're probably right, but this is what the Flash Guy says:
"But let’s talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let’s take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. I’m happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple."
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641
Personally I think Flash is a resource hog and a piece of crap, and it needs to die soon.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
The Flash mobile user experience may or may not be optimal ... either way, I'm willing to bet that it beats a picture of a blue lego with a question mark on it.
No. Adobe should not be allowed to drag it's feet and fail to
support the acceleration hardware and APIs available to it on
just about every platform (including Linux).
One nice benefit of HTML5 over Flash for web video is that
EVERY ONE will be able to use the hardware enabled h264
decoder of their choice.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The point is: despite noise to the contrary, the only platform where a complete Silverlight implementation exists is Windows.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What would take the place of FLASH games?
er... talk bs much? funny how you get from adobe not caring about making the plugin work smoothly on the mac to them going down the toilet... lol
what else but conceited and self important rubbish would we expect from an apple creep like yourself.
what is about this f******* company that attracts all the biggest cocksuckers around. seriously, its freaky.
So let me get this straight ...
Apple needs to help Adobe, a large powerful software company, fix its flash player for OS X ... even though countless other 3rd party apps run fine in OS X and are more than happy to play video with practically no CPU usage at all?
I don't think you actually understand the difference between political posturing and bullshit, and the realities of writing software.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You mean ... like the iPhone ... with a single core, low power CPU, with 128M of ram, and a flash storage based 'hard disk' ...
Hrmm, in that case there are millions of machines that Adobe wants to put flash on that are actually lower in spec than what you're talking about.
Adobe is in fact, complaining that Apple won't let them put it on those lower spec'd devices and calling it Apples problem that their software sucks ass.
Adobe IS LAZY and rapidly becoming worthless. How many years has OSX been out and they STILL haven't fixed their products to install on a case sensitive file system, WHAT THE FUCK.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
There's only one reason why there's no Flash or Java on the iPhone - because you wouldn't be forced through the app store if they had either of them (unless they crippled them extensively like they were thinking about with Flash until people started pointing out - "uh, if the flash experience is the problem, why will you let the flash experience run on the iPhone only we still have to go through the app store?" - LOL ) and you wouldn't need Apple's development machines and environment to write software for it. If they could somehow get away with not implementing HTML5 (which they can't) you could rest assured it wouldn't be on the iPhone/iPad/iWhatever either.
I can't believe the number of people who lap up this Apple drivel - flash experience is poor? LOL, I wonder how it managed to get such huge market penetration and basically pervade every aspect and corner of the web - oh, I guess because it's crap, right Apple?
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I'm not saying Adobe's going down the toilet, I'm saying that the wave of drooling on the Flash-less iPad is flushing their dreams of Flash-as-platform. I've been stuck wrestling with Flash for a decade, and there's a distinct note of Adobe wanting Flash to be a universal platform, similar to Sun's longstanding dream of Java's future. Note that more of their tools' UI is done in Flash now; they're eating their own dogfood in that respect.
I do like to suck cock, but I don't see how that's connected with me owning a Mac.
egypt urnash minimal art.
You should seek help for your anger management problems.
Well, maybe it's not important. Net rage usually only results in keyboard abuse....
"Adobe Is Lazy" : Apple’s Steve Jobs
Reading the GP, it sounds like Apple doesn't need to help. They simply need to stop actively obstructing.
It's like the fricking one button mouse all over again.
Adobe IS LAZY
squaw! squaw! Does Polly want a cracker?
(his cage has been sitting too close to Steven Jobs again....)
Install XP on that box, and see if Flash runs fine. Then you've got all the evidence you need as to where the problem is.
Though given how awful iTunes and Quicktime run on Windows, I don't know whether Steve Jobs has any right to call others lazy.
Just take the second paragraph of your comment, and swap in Apple where you typed Adobe.
Quicktime uses the API's exposed by the core-graphics system.
Doesn't Microsoft make claims like that too? That they have placed a 'firewall' between the Apps and the OS developers?? That Office is all coded very honestly by a crack team of former Eagle Scouts to ONLY use published API calls?
We'd need to see the source code to be sure, now, wouldn't we?
Flash isn't really any more powerful than that.
It is, though, it's not sandboxed. It has access to your filesystem, your hardware (microphones, webcams, etc.), it can take your video full-screen, etc.
And, if Apple lets the camel's nose under the tent, no doubt subsequent versions would support GPS, accelerometer, etc., on 'all platforms that support it'.
Apple can rightly cite security, performance, and efficiency as reasons not to approve flash, so they can really maintain control through their App Store. And it's not just control of app selection, but developer mindshare. If you could write iPhone apps in Flash and deploy the same app on Android, Symbian, Maemo, and Moblin, then many fewer developers would write in Apple's SDK. So, it's a measure to hurt the competition as well.
When interest in developing mobile Cocoa apps start to subside, they can allow Flash in, and each Adobe release is a face-saving opportunity to 're-consider' its merits. If we're all lucky, though, HTML5 makes this unnecessary.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
mobile is far more about functionality then experience because it is such a limiting platform.
That is utterly opposite to the experience I have had developing mobile apps for the iPhone. Functionality is nothing with experience making it pleasant to use, and if you've done it right the mobile device does not feel limiting, it feels empowering. There is no excuse for ANY of the modern mobile platforms today (iPhone OS, Android, PalmOS) to be making applications that are solely feature-centric, nor will users buy them. Even if they are free.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Flash solved can everyone watch my video?
That is totally true. And much like Apple solved the "have to have DRM around online music sales" by being the only place to sell music (forcing studios to drop DRM in order to control price), Flash has thankfully gotten us to the point where everyone can watch video, encoded in h.264 (that's what the online flash video is almost all encoded in these days).
Flash made a great scaffolding, but it is time to drop that scaffolding and use a solution that is more performant and truly cross platform - h.264. And why is it more cross-platform? Because more chips that decode it in hardware mean more devices that can play that format than any format that would need a powerful CPU for decoding. The fact is it can simply run on way more platforms.
HTML5 isn't going to change things unless browser vendors agree on a common codec.
They have, it's h.264. That is all major browser vendors but one - Mozilla. While it's nice they are trying to take a stand and I have to admire them for that, the reality is Chrome will take away ALL of Mozilla's userbase in short order unless they go with the flow on this issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...namely that Flash has its strengths
[proof needed]!
P.S.: Citations don’t prove shit.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I was just going to post the same links, but it should be noted the server is free and also open source.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not.
I read the Adobe press releases too.
However how do you then explain that four or so small flash ads in a page with minimal advertising send the CPU's into a similar frenzy? There's no h.264 involved there. Just really crappy programming.
That's what finally drove me to install ClickToFlash in Safari about a year ago. From that point on, the only flash I ever clicked to activate was on YouTube, which now happily offers that HTML5 video trial. And I love ads, I mean in the sense that I feel they support sites I like to visit so I never even thought about installing an ad-blocker.
I think the Flash proponents are mostly using ad-blockers and have forgotten just how much suck there is on web pages these days, much of it heavily Flash driven.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not like this is a problem that is specific to Flash. It's the same problem that all UIs have. Flash UIs will adjust accordingly
What UI's have "adjusted"? The only successful ones to date (Android, iPhone OS, PalmOS) were designed from the ground up to be pointerless UI's.
Windows 7 on tablets basically still has a mouse pointer, they just hide it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone who makes a site completely out of Flash should be _shot_. Repeatedly. In the face and crotch. If I'm using flashblock, I should still be able to see more than a site's copyright notification. Using flash to design a site beyond video is nothing more than ostentatiousness. First you use a little flash for an animated menu. Then you do a little more for a slideshow on the front page. Soon you're serving *all* your content that way, your site takes 30-45 seconds or MORE to load on a broadband connection, and there's a 10 second delay to navigate to a new area on the site. I expect that shit on dial-up, not a 3mbps or more connection. If you can't make a good site without Flash, fucking hire a professional or STAY OFF THE NET.
BUMP BUMP
I wish that Slashdot had a mechanism to increase this beyond the level this post is at. Web programmers need to read and re-read this daily!
If you use flash as described on a commercial site as described above, I will not do business with you, PERIOD.
If you are a BANK or BROKERAGE you just shot yourself in the foot BIG TIME by using FLASH.
apparently, your concepts of how to use flash are quite limited. as a matter of fact, the *applications* i write are often full (browser) screen flash apps with nothing else on the page. it's okay, i understand you've been bombarded by so many flash ads and you simply must conceive of the platform as nothing more then banners and video games and video playback. but you're wrong and get yourself past the mundane: http://openlaszlo.org/ your welcome.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
34% seems a bit optimistic.
On my Macbook (late 2006 Core2 - probably the same CPU as that Mac Mini uses), Flash itself uses somewhere around 95% of one core when playing video. Any video. It doesn't actually matter how large the video is (although HD videos are unwatchable), or what clock speed the CPU is running at, the CPU usage is basically constant.
No other media players (VLC, QuickTime), browser plugins (QuickTime, Flip4Mac), or even Safari's HTML5 video support do this. Since the likes of QuickTime perform far better when embedded in a web page than Flash does, that rules out a problem with the plugin interface. Safari's HTML5 video performance rules out the browser's rendering too - HTML5 videos are much more integrated into the page than a plugin, with all the extra rendering complexity that involves, and they're still faster.
It's not just a raw performance problem. They'd have to be doing busy waits, or polling loops, or something else stupid. It wouldn't surprise me if they were measuring performance based on Flash itself, running stand-alone, while the actual problem is in their plugin code.
Complaining that the performance of Flash on Mac OS X is somehow Apple's fault is just crap. I've heard many claims that Flash video is slower on Mac OS X due to lack of h.264 hardware acceleration. Of course, the Windows version only got this very recently, and Flash video ran just fine on Windows before that. QuickTime runs fine without it. Both Safari and Chrome can play h.264 videos just fine without it. Same goes for the complaints about the plugin model. If it really were that bad, why doesn't Silverlight have the same problems? For that matter, which doesn't the plugin (not ActiveX) version on Windows have the same problem - the plugin API is pretty much the same, after all.
Adobe's claims that Flash has no known crashing bugs are a load of crap too. According to Apple's crash reports from Safari, Flash is responsible for the majority of crashes. According to Mozilla's crash report data, Flash is responsible for the majority of crashes in Firefox on Mac OS X.
Anecdotally, Firefox crashes on me two or three times a day. Of those crashes, I've only ever found one that was caused by Firefox itself - all the rest were caused by Flash. I've actually had to switch to Chrome (which, for various reasons, I don't like as much as Firefox) specifically because of Flash crashing so much. Now, I get the sad plugin box two or three times a day. I've never seen the sad tab page, and I've only had Chrome itself crash once. And this is the developer channel version, which is expected to break.
And then there's the bugs. Many Flash widgets, particularly video players, just don't work reliably on a Mac. All too often, I've had video streams that just refuse to play, or which keep stopping to buffer when there's still several minutes of video left in the buffer, or completely break if you attempt to seek... They all work just fine on the Windows version, of course.
That's just the Mac version. The Linux version of Flash is actually far worse. It's even slower than the Mac version, crashes more frequently, has all the same bugs as the Mac version, and then has a whole load of bugs of it's own.
Frankly, anyone who claims that Flash is cross-platform has clearly never actually used Flash on any platform other than Windows.
That's all fine and dandy but all of the Safari crashs I've had in the past 2 years have been flash plug in related.
Secondly, watching a YouTube video at 480p on my 2.5GHz Core2 Duo takes ~35% of the CPU time available. Watching the same video using the HTML5 version, ~3% of the CPU time available. Even if they did drop it down to 16%, that is still a lot to make vertical mobile Hardware/Software vendors cringe at the power consumption.
Flash is cool because it has a large enough install base at this point you can say it is a compatible way to display rich media in a web page that displays on 99% of the computers in the US. I can't think of any other good things about flash, even if they fix the horrible CPU usage.
thats so true.. they have mutilated the old FreeBSD so bad and still never hesitate to call it unix underneath...
But will it stop crashing?
Several times I've been wanting to get more info on something I wanted to buy, and I looked up the manufacturer's site using my iPhone -- and the entire main page was Flash (i.e. useless). I used that time to take a step back and reevaluate my need for that product, and the times it's happened I've decided on either another product or that I really didn't want to go to the trouble of pursuing it anymore.
Beatport.com 100% flash, I don't mind it so much because it's basically a music player.. it would be hard to make a similar site without something like flash.
MABASPLOOM!
Actually MacOSX has a nice tool that lets you trace the function calls any program makes. Additionally, the MacOSX kernel is opensource and lets you instrument and inspect any of these calls.
If you can't make a good site without Flash, fucking hire a professional or STAY OFF THE NET.
There's a contractor that my employer deals with. She's a designer. I decided to take a look at her personal/business page. It's all fucking flash. It takes approximately 20 seconds to load and start displaying anything useful. I use a Core 2 Duo machine with 4GB of memory and we have a 25Mbps FiOS connection and this shit takes 20 seconds to load. Pages loaded faster when I was using a 33Mhz Mac on a dialup connection.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The reason why Flash video took off is that the video plug-in experience was less than seamless.
DRM on Flash appeared long after it became popular thanks to Youtube.
It's been proven again and again that Adobe is not capable of coding a flash player with good performance or reliability on any platform -- especially so if the platform != Windows.
If Adobe had a single example of that, I would have some sympathy for them. They don't.
How many modern applications can you run on an old single core computer?
All of the ones that are coded to use only the resources necessary.
I play 720p HD video on a Pentium M LV 1.5GHz processor without a stutter in sight... now why should that same processor grind to a halt when it hits 320x240 video embedded in a web site?
That's right, someone fucked up.
That's just it - the same 1080p video on Youtube uses 50% more CPU than playing it directly with a decent (software-based!) decoder in a regular media player. On XP, on Vista, and on Windows 7.
The problem is Flash.
Two words: Target lawsuit
The Flash Guy reminds me a lot of the Photoshop Guy complaining about a bug in Exposé which they're seemingly the only company to experience.
It would be ridiculously easy and you'd get far more useful and readable URLs too - right now you can't even copy + paste links to tracks. The problem is having a track play continuously while browsing other pages. That can be solved with a small player popup window that shows your queued tracks.
While I agree with you, that is somewhat Apple's fault. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. In Flash 10, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported on OS X because Apple does not expose access to the required APIs.
Hardware acceleration for H264 decoding is not used by Flash player on any platform today. Flash player *will* use hardware acceleration for H264 with Flash Player 10.1 which is still in in alpha/beta.
Plus, a little hint: the bottleneck was never with the decoding, but with the rendering.
Apple won't release the APIs to allow for Flash GPU acceleration on Macs. Microsoft allows it and Flash is obviously faster on Windows. Apple is lazy, plain and simple.
Got completely sucked into the distortion field, didn't you?
Sounds more like your computer sucks.
How do you "actively obstruct" just a single application/plugin while the rest of your 3rd party developers are quite happy and unrestricted with speedy apps.
Flash is *dog slow* on OS X - I have a Core 2 Duo iMac (2.1Ghz) and using the high quality stream (not the HD stream) pushes my CPU use up near 70%. I can drop it a little by playing the stream fullscreen, and it drops to about 45% ish, but it is still a crazy amount for playing back a video stream.
If Adobe can't pull its finger out and write a decent plugin with all the developer information available from Apple, even if Apple does nothing, then they are just being lazy (or someone at Adobe is blocking it).
"Actively obstructing" probably means "wah wah! Apple won't implement DirectX on OS X so we can't just lazily rename flash.exe to flash.app and call it a port, we actually have to write some platform-specific code and we don't want to!"
Yes yes, I know it's not likely to be that simple, but this is software politics. I am certain that there's no code in OS X that says "if plugin=flash then emulatecpu=pentium200".
And "one button mouse all over again?" - Apple has supported the multi button mouse for well over 10 years. Just plug it in. Works right away. It's not like you would plug one in and a window pops up saying "too many buttons!" - OS X has supported right clicking since it was first released, and OS 9 also supported it.
For some reason, I am betting BikeHelmet's computer is waist deep in viruses. Flash/YouTube still plays fine with all my old setups (1Ghz single core and up).
Do you have any tech friends that can look at your computer for you? Perhaps a son or daughter? If not, you should recycle your /. userid and go into marketing. Its bad enough spreading FUD around, but to spread FUD from your own short-comings takes the cake.
Mouse wheel does not work on Beatport.com, the site makes Firefox or Safari consume 40-60% of my 2.4GHz Core2 Duo, also consumes 100MB more RAM.
The ONLY reason it isn't run on the iPod/iPad/iPhone is money. Plain & simple.
Flash would make it possible, even easy, to replicate a lot of things that Apple currently charges money for.
They don't want that. So no Flash support.
I don't accept that. Apple released all the development tools necessary for writing software on OS X, and they come for free as either an install option or a download. Adobe have no excuse on this front.
Apple don't need to cooperate. They don't need to do a thing.
The ball's in Adobe's court, and they think they're playing chess.
I'd much rather what they have now over a popup..
MABASPLOOM!
As it will. H.264 already has lots of good editors. Can Flash still play on most web browsers? Sure. Those nice flashing banner ads will turn purple and green and red all you want.
The lack of flash support on the iphone and ipad have nothing to do with its lack of technical capabilities, and everything to do with sites like lala.com. If people are able to stream music for free, they aren't going to pay for itunes.
Adobe's main IDE is apparently from a company that went under years ago, this is partially what according to the shills project blogs slowed down the transition to x86 and what seems to be making a carbon-cocoa transition less than painless. They already missed the ball, people are just waiting for another player to replace them.