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."

Comments

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[russotto]

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?

Flash solved "can everyone watch my video?"

[naz404]

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".

Re:Jobs once called Adobe lazy and he may be right

[Pius II.]

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.