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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.
... 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.
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?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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?!
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
"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.
...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?
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.
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 ----
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
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."
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.
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.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
"Adobe Is Lazy" : Apple’s Steve Jobs