Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
"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.
Neither *nix nor FF are threatened by H.264. All you need is this. Pretty sure there's also a VLC plugin available that would do the trick as well.
Caveat Utilitor
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
Microsoft: H.264 for IE (and they are already licensing it in Windows 7). Will not support Theora.
I haven't seen any official announcements on this yet. That said, the most likely approach IE will take is to just use DirectShow, which means that it'll use whatever codecs are installed on the system - H.264 is in Win7, yes, but you can always install Theora codecs.
Google: H.264 for Chrome (but not for the open source version!).
Isn't it both H.264 and Theora out of the box with Chrome?
Opera: Theora. Could support H.264, but wants Theora more.
The upcoming Opera 10.50 (which is the first stable release to come with HTML5 video support) will use GStreamer for codecs on all platforms. Which means that H.264 support can be added by the user if needed.
There are also various Linux media players with firefox plugins that will happily play h264.
The idea that Linux would be locked out of h264 is beyond absurd.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Adobe Is Lazy" : Apple’s Steve Jobs