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Adobe Flash CS5 Exports Animations To HTML5 Canvas
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe's Flash CS5 will seek to make the Flash runtime less relevant with support for exporting animations to HTML5 canvas. Seth Weintraub from 9to5mac writes, 'In a previous post, I'd wondered why Adobe didn't spend its time building HTML5 authoring tools rather than putting so much time/energy/money into its Flash -> iPhone Apps exporter tool for Flash CS5. As it turns out, Adobe does have some, albeit rudimentary, HTML5 Canvas exporting tools, as demonstrated in the video above.'"
"Adobe does have some, albeit rudimentary, HTML5 Canvas exporting tools"
Tells me they only had this as a backup plan for when shit hit the fan, which they never expected to have happen so soon.
Apple got Adobe with their pants down and now Adobe is scrambling.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Adobe has always been more about good editing tools, rather than runtime platforms.
Yeah, maybe when Photoshop and Illustrator were their main products. Since then (and particularly since the acquisition of Macromedia) they have been all about "owning the platform" and trying to tie their products into the web. It's not just Flash, they took PDF from being a nice WYSYWIG print document format, and then started embedding all kinds of interactive bullshit into it. Or Adobe AIR.
Since around the turn of the Century, they stopped being about creative tools and started marketing to executives as being "business tools." The rapid decline of their applications was very evident, as they lost focus and tried to shoehorn their "platform" thinking into every product, even if it didn't really belong there.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Just to clarify, I like it that way. I don't look forward to the day when any old site can peg my CPU and I can't prevent it. God knows, some people's JavaScript is bad enough.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Bashing Apple for the sake of bashing Apple doesn't bring your point across very well. That even stopped working for Microsoft, finally.
Face it, Apple's hugely popular, you don't have to like it or agree with it, but denying it brings you nowhere. And they're using their influence to further their own agenda. Who wouldn't?
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
That seems true from observation of their actions, but I can't imagine the business case really lines up with it.
Nobody ever accused most executives that run big businesses today of being particularly competent at business. They mostly exist to enrich themselves by selling the company down the river for short-term gains.
From everything I can discern, Photoshop and Illustrator are still by far their cash cows.
I haven't seen any figures, but I wouldn't be so sure. Flash and Dreamweaver are very popular in web design and production. Anyway, nobody buys Illustrator or Photoshop as standalone products anymore, you buy the Creative Suite, and get the other stuff thrown in with it.
Their ownership of PDF helps them sell some PDF authoring tools, but it's not the revenue stream that Photoshop is.
Again, I'm not so sure about this. People may not buy Photoshop and Illustrator as standalone products, but businesses do buy Acrobat Pro as a standalone product in large quantities. Sure it costs less to buy, but it also costs less to develop, and when you buy Creative Suite it counts as an Acrobat Pro sale as well as a Photoshop sale.
I don't have any hard answers, but to me the weirdest thing is the change of culture. Having worked in design and photo editing, it used to be hell to try and get the boss to fork out for a copy of Photoshop. They would say "why can't we use something cheaper, like Corel, or [shudder] Microsoft Paint, or perhaps pirate it?" This was at a time when Photoshop had few serious competitors. Today, Photoshop has mounting competition, and the bosses have the opposite attitude - "If it's not Adobe, there must be something wrong with it. It can't be very good if it's that much cheaper." It's the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft" syndrome all over again. And just like that syndrome, it is highly entrenched. There are courses all over the world in web design that basically teach Flash and Dreamweaver as the holy grail, and teach people to do web mock-ups in Photoshop, and those courses will address issues like HTML5 when hell freezes over.
It's a bit sad, as someone who has used Adobe stuff from almost the beginning, to see that people now miss the point. Rather than seeing the potential of the tools, it's become entrenched rote-learning and slavishness to the product, rather than the vision.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm confident the advances in technology in the last 20 years means your CPU will be perfectly fine playing that video or running that badly written javascript.
You do not need 100% total control over your CPU, unless you have absolutely nothing else going on in your life.
I'm confident that advances in technology will mean that there will be something else clogging the CPU in 20 years.
It is what it is.
I'm not sure HTML5 is much better. A lot of the (non video) demos I've tried use insane amounts of CPU. What's it going to be like when there's heavy HTML5 integrated into site functionality and banner ads?
The nice thing about Flash, from the perspective of someone who wants to turn it off, is that a Flash movie is self-contained. Each Flash thing in the UI is a separate blob of code. With canvas, this separation is not present. A browser can refuse to generate a drawing context from a canvas tag, but it can't isolate separate components of the page's script. JavaScript has a single global namespace and everything in a page is squished into this. You can't easily turn off JavaScript and canvas and then turn it back on selectively, just allowing the canvas tag that you want.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
implementing != inventing
I don't know who actually invented it, but your logic isnt really flawless
People, what a bunch of bastards
It will take years to optimize HTML5 to something comparable to Flash. And maybe it will still be a bit slower than Flash. The point is not speed. The point is not scripting. Scripting is as bad if not worst, than a binary stream vectorial format. The points is a document model, that is easier to examine by bots and archivers, that can be modified by external tools, that can be linked, and all the good and cool features we have learn a Hyper Text have.
A binary stream of bits that render vectorial stuff is not fun, because you can't do much with these bits. A greasemonkey script is fun, google page rank search engine is fun.
Even if Flash is fast, a what price?, you have to support a separate things, with his own memory management and probably bugs. And is not that good either, Linux users have bad experience with Flash banners that take the 100% of the CPU.
Having everything following the document model (dom), any optimization made will touch all. Any optimization on the memory handling will affect all. Any safety mechanism. Updating the browser will update the rendering of such canvas thing, or svg thing.
I don't think Flash game dev's will move to HTML5 in 5 or 8 years. Flash will still be more interesting. But there will be a "leak" of the good features of Flash into the web, so the web will get whatever good we have learn from Flash. So Flash will not be required for some things. At a point, you will not *need* Flash. Needing Flash is *mucho* wrong, and we DO NOT WANT.
Some people will argue that "Flash-like" features in the web are bad news. These people are right. Animated banners in HTML5 are not better than in Flash. But with a better model, these will be more easy to control, limit, optimize.
And people want these Flash features. I serve no one to ignore that Flash add value to the web. We will steal (with HTML5 and SVG and Canvas) part of these value, to make the web AWESOME.
-Woof woof woof!
Name one.
There is no serious competition for Photoshop. I wish it were. Corel stopped innovating years ago. Gimp is still a toy for professional work and I really don't know any other professional program that can do what Photoshop can.
I'm saying this as a former Corel user. It wasn't easy for me to fork money for PS, but I had to because I realized that no other tool comes close. Sure, there's Fireworks (also by Adobe) and Corel Painter but they are specialized tools.
Yes, people are abusing Canvas just like they abuse Flash, but at least with Canvas, Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc can DO something about the poor performance, rather than just listening to Adobe piss and moan and blame others, because Apple doesn't give a fucking browser plugin direct access to hardware.
What is...?
Why? The Flash Player has over a decade of poor design decisions in SWF, bug-for-bug reproduction, etc, that it has to keep backward compatibility with. HTML5 canvas gets a nice fresh start having (hopefully) learned those lessons. IMHO, you'll see a lot of work with phenomenal improvements optimizing the runtimes, just like we saw with Javascript, in a quick surge. A lot of the same engineers who did did the magic on javascript are working on the HTML5 canvas implementations.
I think that depends on whether Adobe makes the judgment call as to whether its more important to keep their Flash tools on top or not. If they conclude that the future is HTML5, they will bring their Flash/Flex/Air dev tools to be first class development environments for targeting HTML5 canvas; rather than being marginalized and losing their market share to a competitor in web animation authoring. Or perhaps they'll choose to compete on the platform itself, so they can own it. Time will tell.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
...... To basically sum up, yes, this locks developers on the iPhone OS. On the other hand, these meta-platforms hurt Apple's ability to improve their devices. ......
You know, Microsoft used to make claims like that all the time during the anti-trust proceedings, that the trials were hurting their ability ot "innovate" and "improve" their products. Everyone used to deride Microsoft about their pathetic excuses. Now it's Apple doing the same thing.....
Just to clarify, I like it that way. I don't look forward to the day when any old site can peg my CPU and I can't prevent it. God knows, some people's JavaScript is bad enough.
Adobe doesn't care so much if they peg your CPU, because you're forced to use their product anyway. If an actual browser renders sites very slowly, on the other hand, people will leave it for a different browser. Performance is paramount to browser implementers.
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