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Apple's Change of Heart On Flash

Posted by kdawson on from the platform-with-a-capital-p dept.

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."

8 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Adobe Flash will die by xororand · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Adobe Flash will die by sopssa · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If anything, HTML5 is actually the cause that might allow pushing Linux and Firefox even further away.

      Basically the situation is currently this;

      Microsoft: H.264 for IE (and they are already licensing it in Windows 7). Will not support Theora.
      Apple: H.264 for all OS X, iPhone and iPad. Will not support Theora.
      Google: H.264 for Chrome (but not for the open source version!). May roll out their own video codec, to mix things even a little bit more.
      Mozilla: Theora for Firefox. There is no way they can use H.264 because of countless amount of open source forks. Could only possible support it in main binary Firefox, other users left without.
      Opera: Theora. Could support H.264, but wants Theora more.

      Develop a plugin that plays H.264 video inside browser to circumvent that Firefox situation? Flash already does exactly that.

      Either HTML5 Video will seriously fail and Flash will continue dominating, or the big players will use it to push Firefox and other open source browsers and Linux off the market.

    2. Re:Adobe Flash will die by russotto · · Score: 5, Interesting

      So basically you are implying that free and open source itself isn't a sustainable model? That to get full use of it, people should lower to piracy?

      Do you really expect to win a rigged game by playing by the rules?

  2. One big fat reason that gets missed... by Penguinisto · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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?
  3. Re:ActionScript vs. JavaScript by chill · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you want an example, just look at ActiveX and IE6. I expect Flash to take the same route. A long, lingering, painful death.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  4. Flash solved "can everyone watch my video?" by naz404 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Regarding the HTML5 vs Flash video debacle, Radley Marx says it best on his blog post "Five Myths of HTML5 (vs. Adobe Flash)":

    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
    1. Re:Flash solved "can everyone watch my video?" by naz404 · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I read somewhere that Google isn't not going to use Ogg Theora on YouYube because it isn't as efficient as H.264 and would eat up too much storage space on their datacenters. A user comment at Mozillazine blog post "Video, Freedom And Mozilla" gives a few good points:

      TK: I think that the fact that Google only enabled h.264 HTML5 video on youtube has more to do with the fact that all their videos were already encoded in that format (at 3 different resolutions), for iPhone and Android support. Therefore, it was relatively easy to just turn on the switch for beta HTML5 embedding.

      Transcoding all those videos to Ogg Theora (with multiple copies for SD, HQ and HD) would require a major computing effort and storage space availability, that, sadly, just isnt worth it at this point. Remember, it took MONTHS in 2007 for youtube to transcode all of their h.263 FLV videos to h.264 mp4's for iPhone support. And that was before Youtube added 720p and 1080p HD video support. They'd literally have to double their datacenters' storage space!!

      --
      http://www.object404.com
  5. Re:Jobs once called Adobe lazy and he may be right by Pius+II. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.