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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."
... to a mobile device, without using Flash. Go on, try it. I'm waiting.
In that case I imagining the existence of solutions for the iPhone that do just that. France24, YouTube and StreamToMe being three examples. I can concede there is room for improvement, but there are solutions, if the installed customer base is of interest to you.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Hulu sells advertising in their feeds, Apple does not.
It's all about money indeed.
Silverlight does not stream any video to my Linux machine. Of course it should, but somehow it doesn't. Weird isn't it, even though there is this moonlight thingy, the most important internet application somehow does not work right. So Silverlight is basically just working on Windows (and I presume, Windows mobile). Da Silva, I know you are reading, care to comment on that?
Live streaming using H.264 seemed to work just dandy watching the State of the Union address on my iPhone while using the Whitehouse.gov iPhone app. Also seems to work great with MLB At-Bat on the iPhone as well. I watched many baseball games last season streaming live H.264 video to the iPhone.
But can you do it with a generic app which will connect to any server?
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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."
Why can't they let us decide?!
This.
Also, Flash is a programming language. Apple doesnt allow programming languages onto iPods, iPhones, or iPads.
Flash could replace a large majority of whats on the App Store.
"His name was James Damore."
What a strange comment, you just make larger buttons for a finger to press them. The same way all interfaces work on a mobile platforms.
meep
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 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)
Nah. This isn't the first time some non-free stuff hasn't mixed well with Linux. Oil and water man.
Let's see, there's libdvdcss, most wireless drivers until very recently, had to be fetched using some sketchy cutter tool. Flash gets fetched from gawd knows where by the flashplugin-nonfree package,
People who use firefox or linux will tolerate a little configuration pain, even if the codec has to come from a warez server in Russia.
I personally wish we didn't all walk into yet another propitiatory format though, because it's just history repeating itself.
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 ----
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 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.
What happens to open source browsers like FF who can't pay for the patents and licenses?
755 corporations have licensed H.264. AVC/H.264 Licensees It's a damned impressive list. Scrolling through it is like watching a freight train build up speed and momentum.
While Firefox is beginning to look more and more like the heroine tied to the railroad tracks around the next bend.
91% of Mozilla's funding comes from Google. Could open source abandon the Google train? Now would be a really, really good time to put some of that money to good use. Cut a deal.
Because I don't think Rin-Tin-Tin is coming to the rescue.
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.
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.
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Right, HTML5 is a paper tiger. They'll just add a codec= field to the video tag a call it day. Some browsers will support some codecs and others will support other codecs. End users will be baffled from the start and everyone will stick with Flash.
And this is where you fail.
NO ONE GIVES A SHIT as long as what they want works for them.
People don't care about the technical way things do or don't work, they care that they can click/touch a button and watch a damn video. They could give a shit about open, they want 'works' first.
But to answer your question, yes, the way it works on the iPhone with video is an xml file on a web server describing what the URL is to the various available streams and describing the properties of those streams so the device can auto select.
Its all very well documented and easy to understand. The iPhone (and probably OS X though I didn't look into it) has an advantage in that it has a nice library that only needs to see the xml file and it'll do the rest for you. You'd need to reimplement that library else where, but its a fairly trivial XML file on the server to read to get at the rest of the streams.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
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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That stand is, of course, H.264 has patent encumbrances which require royalties. How deep are your pockets?
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I'm certain that when MPEG LA offers perpetual royalty-free licenses for H.264 under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms that Mozilla will change its policy.
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